FIJI’S FINEST
Renowned coach helped a rugby-crazed country realize its Olympic dreams, Jerry Brewer writes.
Three years ago, Ben Ryan — a self-described “ginger bloke with glasses” — took his red hair and black frames to Fiji. The British rugby coach was fighting burnout. So he took a new coaching job more than 16,000 kilometres away, on a South Pacific Ocean island decorated with beaches and palm trees.
“It wasn’t a hard sell,” Ryan said, grinning.
It was harder when he didn’t get paid the first five months, when he realized the Fiji men’s rugby sevens team couldn’t afford gas for the team bus or even water to serve during practice. It was hardest in February, when Category 5 cyclone Winston unleashed its 300-kilometre-an-hour winds on the country, killing 44 people, causing half a billion dollars in damage and leaving some players homeless.
But now, Ryan is coach of the best team in the sport: back-to-back World Sevens Series champions and Olympic gold medallists.
Fiji beat Great Britain 43-7 to win gold Thursday in the sport’s Olympic debut. South Africa won bronze.
“I’m a little bit lost for words,” Ryan said after the win. “The boys were on another scale of phenomenal. They were brilliant.”
The win gave Fiji, a nation of only about 900,000 people, their first Olympic medal. The country had never won one, not in 14 Summer Games and not in three winter competitions. Don’t think this won’t mean a lot. Rugby is so popular in Fiji that Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama announced who made the 12-player Olympic team to the nation. It is considered as important as national service — a few players were called from the army to participate. Ryan was treated as a hero even before this win, mobbed for pictures, immortalized in song and hearing stories of Fijian children named after him.
“This is the nation’s team,” Ryan said. “The entire country will have watched this and they all should be thrilled about the performance.”
The team has a budget of about US$590,000 this year, less than a quarter of what other national teams spend. The players are earning US$6,000. Some have bypassed lucrative overseas contracts to make this run. Most have normal jobs. They are prison wardens, army officers, police officers, bellhops and sugar-cane farmers. A few are unemployed. They all learned to play the game substituting plastic bottles and flip-flops for the ball and turning to roundabouts for patches of grass.
The coach calls them the “Harlem Globetrotters of rugby,” and when they’re at their best, you really can imagine Sweet Georgia Brown playing as the Fijians perform their own wondrous tricks. That’s is how they looked on Thursday.
Asked about the celebration in Fiji, Ryan could only wonder.
“I have no idea,” he said, “but I think it’s probably already begun.”