Rugby Sevens

Unless you count horse racing, Hong Kong doesn’t have a sports culture. There’s no well-known local team – college or professional - that people can rally around. As for expats, the sports you love depend on where you’re from – sports like tennis and soccer are revered by Europeans and British, while Americans are captivated by football and basketball. Yet, the one thing we expats have in common is missing live broadcasts of sporting events, as most seem to happen while we’re sleeping.

During March Madness, we have certainly felt a void. It’s customary for us to watch games with teams we haven’t seen all season – and to become temporary fans of teams (who during the regular season could be major nemeses) based on our all-important brackets. This year, March Madness included very little game watching (with the exception of a couple of K-State games); we mostly just checked the internet in the morning to find out our brackets were in tatters. It just hasn’t been the same.

But, this past weekend was a bright spot for sports fans in Hong Kong – the Rugby Sevens came to town. Toward the end of last week, it was the talk of the expat community – regardless of country of origin. “Are you going to the Sevens?” seemed to be the greeting of choice. It felt a lot like the days preceding a big football game. Even though we knew nothing about rugby, we got tickets figuring we might as well see what it’s all about.

The Rugby Sevens is both a sporting event and a big party. People from all nationalities flooded the stadium. A good day for taxi drivers!

People of all ages were dressed in costume – there was a little bit of everything from Yasser Arafat to the Mario Brothers, Cleopatra to the Blue Man Group (and quite a few others that were of rather questionable taste!). It was a fun and festive atmosphere, with laughter filling the stands.



Teams playing were from around the world - I would guess very few people actually knew much about all of them. Like the NCAA tournament, people filled out brackets favoring their “home team” and then a bunch of other random teams to win. Part of the fun is also teasing and harassing other fans – for instance, we had practically the whole French International School next to us, cheering for France over Portugal, when after a bit we heard the battle cry of “here we go Portugal, here we go!” from another nearby group that was clearly not Portuguese! Booing was also perfectly acceptable - in fact, probably encouraged - to add to the festivity.

As for the sport, it’s called the Rugby Sevens because there are seven people on each team and each game has two seven minute halves. The clock doesn’t stop during the game and there were only two minutes between games, so the pace was really, really fast. It didn’t take more than a few minutes to understand the rules of the game. The play is a bit brutal but, overall, we thought it was great fun to watch.

The Rugby Sevens event is no replacement for our usual March Madness, but I know we’ll look forward to it again next year!

(PS – In case you’re wondering how the U.S. did, they had a very respectable showing. They made it to the quarter finals, but lost to the team from Samoa, which went on to win the entire tournament.)