How they conquered the world
THE Blitzboks embody what a modern professional sports team should look like because winning at the highest level can no longer be done with talent alone. It is abundant in the upper echelons of professional sport.
To win titles, matches, even moments in matches, takes precise planning and ruthless execution in the heat of battle, which is exactly what has happened behind the scenes of the SA Rugby sevens programme.
Reaching the summit of the sevens game in emphatic style during the 2016/17 HSBC World Seven Series campaign is a triumph for the players’ brilliance and the machinery that has moulded them.
Winning the overall title with one tournament of the 10-leg series to spare is winning by miles in a sport with tiny margins. A missed tackle or dropped pass usually has huge consequences, making consistency hard to achieve.
Consistency has been one of the biggest features of the Blitzboks’ stellar season during which they have reached eight finals and won six of the first nine events of the campaign. Consistency in the face of serious injuries and losses of key players to Super Rugby was achieved thanks to a programme producing one worldclass sevens player after another.
Former Blitzboks Marius Schoeman and Paul Delport, who prepare players to make the step up to the World Series, run the academy, based at the Stellenbosch Academy of Sport (SAS).
At the world-class facility the players are exposed to the best nutrition, sports science and specialist training they could wish for, in an environment oozing excellence.
Blitzbok coach Neil Powell oversees the programme when not on the road and conditioning coach Allan Temple-Jones tracks every player’s fitness daily. Pieter Kruger is their mental coach and other consultants such as breakdown expert Richie Gray are regulars at the SAS.
Because the sevens players are centrally contracted, their entire focus and dedication is to the game and their physical conditioning. There is a lesson here. The Blitzboks are the only players that SA Rugby fully contracts and controls. Springboks and Junior Springboks all have secondary paymasters and are involved in different levels of competition, with different training and conditioning programmes.
“Our sevens programme has been running for more than a decade and we were one of the first unions in the world to contract sevens players fulltime,” SA Rugby chief executive officer Jurie Roux says.
“This allows the team to prepare in a high-performance environment at the SAS and the results are there for all to see. Since the inception of this programme, the team has won numerous times on the world stage.
“They have consistently finished in the top three of the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series and won it twice. Added to that, the team has won gold at the Commonwealth Games in Scotland and the World Games in Colombia, as well as the first bronze medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
“There has been a consistent flow between our top athletes playing in both sevens and fifteens, with 32 players (out of 165) who became Springboks after first representing the Blitzboks, which includes the likes of Jean de Villiers, Juan de Jongh and Bryan Habana.
“It’s fair to say that our sevens programme rewards those who commit to the code competitively. We are comfortable that our contribution to our sevens programme is in line with world standards.”
It isn’t cheap, but the governing body is committed to funding it. The South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) does supply some funding but essentially SA Rugby pays the bills.
“Sascoc funding does vary, with more allocated in tournament cycles. We have the Commonwealth Games in Australia in 2018 and will see a bigger contribution from Sascoc than in 2017, where no big multi-sport tournaments take place,” Roux says. TRIUMPHANT: The investment in the Blitzboks has paid off
Consistency has been one of the biggest features of the Blitzboks’ stellar season