Every year Hong Kong hosts a rugby tournament where each team only has 7 players a side rather than 15, which is the usual. This means that games go much quicker and in one weekend, or even a day, you can have a whole tournament. I’ve never followed rugby and wouldn’t even consider myself much of a sports fan but most of the exchange students from City U were going and I’d read that the atmosphere was amazing. I managed to troll Hong Kong Craigslist for long enough to find a reasonably priced ticket even though I’d missed out on the student deal because I was in Vietnam.
Rugby fans come from around the world for the 7s, partly for the sport but also for the party. It’s tradition that fans attend in crazy costumes which sometimes reflect their nationality and sometimes are just crazy for the sake of being crazy.
For our costumes we all got white t-shirts and then filled water bottles with paint powder. We set them all in the middle of a park near our school and then all circled around them, someone counted us down and then we all made a mad dash to the centre a la the hunger games to try and get a paint bottle and proceeded to have a paint fight. In the end we all has tie dye looking shirts and topping that off with body paint, whistles and glitter our ensembles were complete.
All of City U got seats right in the front row at the end of the field which was perfect because we could see lots of the action and the players for the next game warming up which was especially fun considering that rugby players are ridiculously in shape! There were also cameras constantly taking pictures of us all and our antics… A number of which ended up in newspapers and online. We were featured on the rugby 7 Facebook page, ESPN and the Wallstreet journal just to name a few!
Before the tournament I wasn’t even sure if Canada was going to be playing but luckily they were and I had a Canadian flag towel that could be substituted for a real flag despite the fact that it was a little grungy and worse for wear. Canada ended up beating the Philippines, which I was quite pleased with as my confidence had been shaky going in given that I had NO clue whether Canada even had a 7s team before. During the game I made a mad dash to the other side of the stadium from where everyone was to try and get closer to the Canadian players and ended up getting on the jumbotron myself!
For the rest of the games I would chose who to support based on how many exchange students were from that area and whether I liked the look of their uniforms! We all cheered, sang songs and were your typical rowdy sports fans for the rest of the day. I may not be the most athletically inclined person but I love going to games when the atmosphere is lively and fans are excited and the tournament ended up being one of the best days I had in Hong Kong!
