He said they deal with pressure daily, more than any rugby sevens player in any part of the world.
Advertisement
The Olympics celebrate sports from all realms.
Fiji saw off Brazil (40-12) and Argentina (21-14) to top Pool A, while the Blitzboks zeroed Spain (24-0) and France (26-0) to finish the day atop Pool B.
Local rugby players think the Canadian women’s rugby bronze-medal win in Rio on Monday could be great for growing the game at home.
Lemeki, who plays club rugby for Honda Heat, joked it is a good thing that rugby is catching up on soccer in Japan as their national team are pretty useless.
Rugby powerhouse New Zealand had no such luck as they were knocked out of the inaugural Olympic sevens tournament in the quarter-finals after a 12-7 loss to top seeds Fiji.
But the day unquestionably belonged to Japan, whose star player Lemeki said of their New Zealand scalp: “It is unbelievable”.
The match had remained deadlocked through a highly entertaining 14 minutes with Argentina skipper Gaston Revol failing in his attempt to win the match with a drop kick penalty goal in the dying seconds. He has played for the Honda Heat since a year ago.
A win on Wednesday over Kenya, which had a breakthrough title on the world sevens circuit last season, would help Japan qualify for the quarterfinals.
New Zealand rebounded to beat Kenya 28-5 in their second pool match to set up a crunch game against unbeaten Britain on Wednesday.
If that was not enough pressure, their prime minister is watching every game from the stands and like all rugby-mad Fijians, Frank Bainimarama knows the finer points of the game.
Tietjens is by far the most successful coach in global sevens history and is well aware of the unpredictability of a sport in which any top tier team can beat another on a given day. “We still want to win test matches, and that’s not guaranteed”. “I thought we’d be lucky to make the quarters, let alone the semis”, he said.
“Rugby’s getting bigger than soccer in Japan, which it should be because the soccer team’s not that great”, Lemeki joked.
“The other (Japanese) athletes at the hotel had never heard of rugby, they thought we were just walking around the athletes’ village”.
“It’s pretty insane. We’ve been told we’ve got to turn our phones off between games”, he said.
Advertisement
Deodoro – South Africans are all too familiar with Japan’s ability to cause an upset on the rugby field, and now so too are New Zealand and France. “It is unbelievable”, said Lemeki.
