User talk:Jackwitts123

Olympics
The sport of rugby union has been played at the Summer Olympics on four occasions, with the last being in 1924. The winners, and thus the reigning champions, were the U.S. team. Rugby union made one more appearance as a demonstration event but was then removed from the Games. The IRB has most recently been very keen to see it return to the Games and is adamant that the sport (specifically referring to rugby sevens) satisfies every respect of the criteria set out in the Olympic Charter.

The main problem for reintroducing the 15-man game to the Olympics is the 7-day turnaround required by IRB regulations for players to rest between games. Since the Olympics only officially run for 16 days, with only slight expansions allowed to accommodate sports such as football, this effectively makes it impossible to conduct a 15s tournament within the current Olympic schedule. This limitation does not apply to sevens, as games last only 14 minutes (20 in championship finals) instead of the 80 minutes in the 15s game. All of the events in the current IRB Sevens World Series, which feature a minimum of 16 national teams, are conducted within a single weekend.

But in furthering the IRB cause, the International Rugby Board became an International Olympic Committee Recognised International Federation in 1995, marked by a ceremonial signing by President Juan Antonio Samaranch prior to a match between Wales and South Africa in Cardiff.

The IRB cites rugby union's global participation, with men playing the game in well over 100 countries, with women playing in over 50 as well; the IRB's compliance with the World Anti-Doping Code; and that a rugby sevens tournament could be (and generally is) accommodated in one stadium and is relatively inexpensive to play. Not only is the sevens game successful in the context of the Sevens World Series and World Cup Sevens, it is also very successfully played in the Commonwealth Games; the sevens tournament at the 2006 Games in Melbourne set all-time attendance records for a sevens tournament.

As a result of this the IRB have applied to the International Olympic Committee for a sevens tournament to form part of the olympics. If this were to happen, sevens would first be played in the 2016 Olympics. However, the inclusion of sevens in the Olympics would, most likely, see the end of the Rugby World Cup Sevens as a tournament, so a to only have one worldwide sevens spectacle every four years. The Sevens World Series would probably remain and become the qualification event for the games.

Subsequently sevens have been accepted into the Summer Olympic Games and will first be played in 2016 in Rio. The Rugby World Cup Sevens has been abolished with the Olympics becoming the main prize in the sport.

January 2010
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