Fiji win the HK Sevens 2016 with a 21-7 win over New Zealand.
Tag: hk sevens
HK Sevens
Dear bc readers
As editor, I apologise that our Sevens coverage hasn’t been as comprehensive as in past years. Especially as during the last domestic rugby season bc magazine averaged around three articles per week on local rugby.
The reason is, and I’ll quote the HK Rugby Union’ s PR mandarin Sean Moore “I will continue to omit you from my press release distribution and invitation to rugby union events”. “I believe that my decision is defensible based on the negative spin consistently applied to those efforts”
Negative spin – that means for bc magazine to get press releases and notification of rugby events and media accreditation to matches for our rugby photograher we must write sycophantic “HKRU is wonderful” advertorials.
bc magazine exposed the HKRU’s introduction of ethnic quotas and active racism to local rugby via a new rule announced last September. The rule was quickly amended after bc’s article was published and a defamatory and factually inaccurate cover-up campaign mounted against myself and bc by the HKRU and it’s Chairman Pieter Schats.
It should also be stated here that World Rugby the sports global governing body refused to condemn the HKRU’s introduction of racism to local sport when asked in September to comment on the new rule. So much for rugby’s stated core values of integrity and respect. Perhaps World Rugby could explain how racism ‘builds character’?
The HKRU thinks bc shouldn’t criticise them for scrapping children’s tickets for the general public at this year’s event. Local children who get inspired by watching rugby at the Sevens are the future player pool of the national side, the dream and the desire to represent your country infront of 40,000 screaming fans starts from watching in the stands.
The blatant sexually discriminatory bias of the HKRU’s website where 90% plus of the coverage is about men’s rugby is shameful given the vibrant and surging growth of the game amongst women locally in recent years. As I write this www.hkrugby.com has no mention of day 1 of the HK Women’s Rugby Sevens. The day’s match results are nowhere to be found.
The HKRU’s response to me writing and exposing the truth – throwing it’s toys out of the pram like a spoilt child and blocking my accreditation as a photographer to cover the Sevens and deleting bc magazine from the HKRU’s media mailing list.
Actively introducing racism to local rugby, price gouging children, sexually discriminatory coverage… The HKRU has far deeper and more institutionalised problems than ‘negative spin’.
For the first time in over 20 years I won’t be slaving over a computer screen till 5am finishing articles and editing photos. Hope you enjoy the rugby, I will!
Go Hong Kong!
HK Sevens Kick-Off Concert
HK Sevens Kick-Off Concert
The Proclaimers, Bjorn Again, David Hasselhoff
Date: 6pm, 6 April, 2016
Venue: Sevens Village
Tickets: $199 from Ticketflap
Hong Kong Sevens 2016
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/HK-Sevens-2015-Sunday/48283437_RCVLxm#!i=3959200288&k=jnRfnZr&lb=1&s=A
The dates for the 2016 Hong Kong Sevens have been confirmed as the 8-10th April 2016
The Hong Kong Sevens are the 7th leg in the Sevens World Series
2015/16 HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series schedule
Round 1: Dubai: 3-4 December
Round 2: Cape Town: 12-13 December
Round 3: Wellington: 30 – 31 January
Round 4: Sydney: 6-7 February
Round 5: Las Vegas: 4, 5, 6 March
Round 6: Vancouver: 12-13 March
Round 7: Hong Kong: 8-9-10 April
Round 8: Singapore: 16-17 April
Round 9: Paris: 14-15 May
Round 10: London: 20-22 May *TBC
Hong Kong Sevens 2016
Date: 8-10 April 2016
Venue: HK Stadium
Tickets: tbc
Magnificent 7 @ The Sevens – Jonah Lomu
The Hong Kong Rugby Football Union (HKRFU) has named Jonah Lomu as the seventh and final member of ‘The Hong Kong Magnificent Seven’, the HKRFU’s assembly of the top seven players to have played at the Hong Kong Sevens over the past 40 years.
Lomu was inducted into ‘The Magnificent Seven’ last night at the 40 Years of Sevens Gala dinner in Hong Kong along with the announced co-winners of the HKRFU’s Hong Kong Hometown Legend campaign, Rowan Varty and Keith Robertson.
Quite possibly the most famous rugby player in history, Jonah Lomu made his debut appearance in Hong Kong in 1994, giving Hong Kong Sevens fans a privileged opportunity to witness a superstar in the making.
Lomu came to Hong Kong as an unheralded youngster but exited the Sevens on the cusp of stardom. Months later he would be selected as the then youngest-ever All Black at just 19 years and 45 days old, making his debut appearance against France. The following year he cemented his reputation as rugby’s most unstoppable force by scoring seven tries at the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa.
Lomu would return to the Hong Kong Sevens in 1995 and 1996 to anchor New Zealand to three successive tournament victories and secure himself an abiding place in Hong Kong’s sporting lore.
He also helped New Zealand win the gold medal at the 1998 Commonwealth Games and led his country to its first Rugby World Cup Sevens victory at the 2001 world championships in Argentina. He is the third Kiwi named in ‘The Hong Kong Magnificent Seven’.
The expert panel of sevens specialists convened by the HKRFU to adjudicate ‘The Hong Kong Magnificent Seven’ obviously did their homework. At yesterday’s pre-event press conference ahead of the 2015 Cathay Pacific/HSBC Hong Kong Sevens (27-29 March), Sir Gordon Tietjens, in charge of the New Zealand Sevens team since 1994, was queried about the three best players he has ever coached.
After little deliberation, Tietjens named Eric Rush, Christian Cullen and Lomu. All three have been named into the Magnificent Seven – making New Zealand the only nation with multiple recipients of this unique honour.
The complete Hong Kong Magnificent Seven are:
| Zhang Zhiqiang | China |
| Ben Gollings | England |
| Christian Cullen | New Zealand |
| Eric Rush | New Zealand |
| David Campese | Australia |
| Waisale Serevi | Fiji |
| Jonah Lomu | New Zealand |
Photos and videos courtesy of their respective owners
Magnificent 7 @ The Sevens – Waisale Serevi
Waisale Serevi, perhaps the most influential player in the history of sevens, has been announced as the sixth player inducted into the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union’s ‘The Hong Kong Magnificent Seven’.
Widely considered the world’s greatest-ever sevens player, Serevi was inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame in 2013 on the sidelines of the Hong Kong Sevens, where he made his international rugby name. He is the first Fijian to be inducted into the Hall of Fame and the first of his countrymen inducted into ‘The Hong Kong Magnificent Seven’.
Serevi, ‘the little magician’, made his Hong Kong debut in 1989, winning player of the tournament honours on debut, and would return on an astonishing 15 further occasions (1990-2000, 2002 and from 2005-07 as player/coach).
Serevi was a part of five cup-winning teams and reached the final on a further seven occasions, massively contributing to Fiji’s record 14 victories in Hong Kong. He was also instrumental in both of Fiji’s Rugby World Cup Sevens wins in Hong Kong in 1997 and 2005.
Uniquely, he has been named the best and fairest player of the Hong Kong Sevens on three occasions (1989, 1990 and 1998) and was also the player of the tournament at both the 1997 and 2005 Rugby World Cup Sevens in Hong Kong.
Serevi spearheaded two periods of remarkably sustained success for Fiji including three consecutive wins from 1990 to 1992 and from 1997 (Rugby World Cup Sevens) to 1999, making Fiji the only nation to have twice accomplished a three-peat in Hong Kong. New Zealand won from 1994 to 1996 and England won from 2002 to 2004.
Serevi also led Fiji to two silver medals at the Commonwealth Games in 1998 and 2002 and captured bronze in 2006. In 2005 he was appointed the Fiji Sevens coach, leading the team to the 2005/06 HSBC Sevens World Series title – the first occasion since the series’ inception in 2000 that the circuit was won by a team other than New Zealand.
In fifteen-a-side, Serevi played 39 times for Fiji in a career that ran from 1989 to 2003, scoring a total of 376 points. In 2002 Serevi topped 1,000 points all-time in Hong Kong.
He returned to lead Fiji to victory once again in Hong Kong at the Rugby World Cup Sevens in 2005, cementing his position in history by finishing as the Rugby World Cup Sevens’ all-time leading points scorer and goal scorer, and the second highest all-time try scorer.
Magnificent 7 @ The Sevens – David Campese
Australia’s David Campese is the fifth member of ‘The Hong Kong Magnificent Seven’, as the HKRFU recognise the seven most formative players to have played in the past 40 Years of Sevens in Hong Kong.
Campo is truly one of a kind. The player who trademarked the goosestep was not as successful at sevens as he was at fifteen-a-side – 101 appearances for Australia and a then-record 64 international tries – but his contribution to the game of sevens and the Hong Kong Sevens was huge.
In 1983, Campese made the first of a dozen appearances in Hong Kong (1983-90, 93-94, 97-98). The Wallabies star lit up the tournament, helping Australia defend its title from the previous year in some of the wettest conditions ever recorded in Hong Kong in March. He would go on to capture two more Cups, in 1985 and 1988 – the last occasion Australia took the top silverware. Campo was as influential in his final match as he was in his first. He won the Leslie Williams Award for player of the tournament in 1988 and ten years later still had pace aplenty to run in tries for Australia.
Campese would bridge generations of powerful Wallaby sides in Hong Kong, from the Mark and Glen Ella, John Maxwell and Simon Poidevin sides of the 1980s to playing alongside Michael Lynagh, Jason Little, Tim Horan and George Gregan in the 1990s.
Campese said on several occasions that he had played his last match for Australia at Sevens but he was convinced to come out of semi-retirement to lead an inexperienced Wallabies team to the
Commonwealth Games in Malaysia in 1998. He proved an inspiration and the old head guided the young guns to a bronze medal, a fitting finale to a great sevens career spanning more than a decade.
Sevens Carnival @ Lan Kwai Fong – 24 March, 2015
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Sevens-Carnival-LKF-24-March15/48195680_HpbCrk#!i=3949973561&k=rZdRQtp
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Sevens-Carnival-LKF-24-March15/48195680_HpbCrk#!i=3949970455&k=NHJBhJG
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http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Sevens-Carnival-LKF-24-March15/48195680_HpbCrk#!i=3949975601&k=MQ6Fzpq
Click on any so see the full gallery of images
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Sevens-Carnival-LKF-24-March15/48195680_HpbCrk#!i=3949967002&k=VDnNPM8
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Sevens-Carnival-LKF-24-March15/48195680_HpbCrk#!i=3949973288&k=BGMXGVF
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Sevens-Carnival-LKF-24-March15/48195680_HpbCrk#!i=3949968010&k=hM5BNSq
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Sevens-Carnival-LKF-24-March15/48195680_HpbCrk#!i=3949974835&k=H2rwGFp
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Sevens-Carnival-LKF-24-March15/48195680_HpbCrk#!i=3949971503&k=qF9mjgX