Plucky Sevens
Rugby team rolls over Brits to take bronze medal
Team captain Jen Kish prides herself on being tough — she takes and delivers hard hits for Canada’s rugby sevens team without hesitation — but after the final whistle here she fell to her knees in heaving, great sobs.
That’s what it looks like when the dream of winning a medal for Canada at the Olympic debut of rugby sevens comes true.
Canada won bronze with its 33-10 victory over Great Britain at Deodoro Stadium Monday night. The top-ranked Australians beat New Zealand 24-17 to win the first ever Olympic gold medal.
33 10
“When the whistle went . . . I just cried like a baby, I was just so overwhelmed, I had no idea I’d react that way. It just shows how much passion we have for this game and each other. It’s just a dream come true,” Kish said.
This team of12 has been through countless injuries and surgeries — knees, shoulders, hands — they have come back from concussions, more than one had to make a tough choice about continuing to train with the team in Langford, B.C., while a parent was going through cancer treatments far away and others have left husbands, partners or professional careers behind, all to chase this Olympic dream.
And for much of this tournament it seemed that the dream that had sustained and driven these players for five long years would end in a crushing disappointment.
In their semifinal earlier in the day, they lost17-5 to Australia and really didn’t look like a team that had a medal of any colour in them.
“We were devastated,” Kish said of their earlier play.
“The gold-medal dream was over but the loss doesn’t define us, it’s how you get up after the loss, and we rose to the occasion.”
“What a freaking historic moment for us. Now, I know what our Canadian women’s soccer team felt like when they got bronze (in 2012 in London).”
This medal will help fund the rugby sevens program — in the Own the Podium era, sports that don’t deliver medals don’t get funded — and, undoubtedly, it will help draw young players to this exciting new Olympic sport. But it’s not the colour they really wanted.
“It’s still bittersweet,” said head coach John Tait, who has been coaching this team and building for this moment since 2011. “If we had been able to put that performance in against Australia we would have been playing for the gold medal instead. It’s a hard lesson.”
They did everything they could to prepare. They came to Rio a year ago to get a feel for the place and cover off the tourist stuff so they wouldn’t be distracted when they got here this time. They skipped the opening ceremony to be fresh for their three-day tournament. They held their final training camp in hot and humid Toronto weather.
Players spoke with Cassie Campbell, a three-time Olympic hockey medallist, who told them to believe that they belonged and that they could win. And they said they did.
But the final necessary piece, which Tait spoke about just before they flew here, seemed to be a problem until the final crucial 20-minute game when they turned everything around.
“To win, it’s going to be the team that is really able to focus and not get distracted and not let the occasion get the better of them . . . We’ve got a lot of X-factor in this group but the real strength is the collective way we play, in both attack and defence. If they stick to what they know, we’ll be in a good place.”
But under pressure in the games that mattered, including the semifinal against the Aussies and bruising 22-0 loss to Britain the day before in pool play, they delivered far from their best.
Rugby sevens is far faster and more unpredictable than the traditional 15-a-side game that was last played at the 1924 Olympics in a men-only event. A single mistake can change everything and the Canadians had more than one.
But, finally, in the bronze-medal game they played the way they always knew they could and that, as well as the medal, is what they leave here with.
“That’s a performance we can be proud of,” said Ghislaine Landry, who scored a team high 18 points in their bronze-medal win. I’m glad people got a chance to see that because that’s what we can do.”