Canadian women’s rugby sevens team moves on from upheaval, splits first two games at Tokyo Olympics

Opinion

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This article was published 29/07/2021 (1504 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TOKYO—They maul and they scrum, they ruck and they tackle.

Knock-on, bind, hook out, breakdown, hospital pass.

The language of rugby has almost an onomatopoeia quality. If the words don’t actually sound like what they mean, they vividly hyperbolize the sport described: grabby and molesty rugby sevens.

Maddened scrambles, body piles, exposed skin scraping along the pitch — grass burn. A sly noogie to the breast, an elbow in the pelvis and you can feel your ovaries cringing. The neck roll — placing an arm around the shoulder or midriff to force an attacking player off her feet, usually called as a foul but often unnoticed by an official in the maul, see above.

So there’s Elissa Alarie, hauled to the ground by the seat of her shorts, hair pulled out every which way from her ponytail scrunchie, using the opportunity to grab a few lung-inflating gasps. And rookie Keyara Wardley, weaving and pivoting on her first try — had a brace of ’em — as Brazilian arms lunge to clutch at her jersey. “It was just a blur.”

Wardley, unfortunately, suffered a hip injury later in the day and is out of the tournament.

Rugby can be nakedly gladiatorial. Which is a huge part of its attraction, for players and fans.

Elbow pads and shin guards and helmets? For sissies and goalies.

“It’s one of the few contact sports where you don’t wear any protective equipment,” Canadian captain Ghislaine Landry said Thursday, in between a win and a loss on the opening day of the Olympic women’s rugby sevens tournament. They fell to 1-2 with a loss to France on Friday morning.

“But our bodies are our armour and we work really hard at that, and we’re proud to go out there and put it on show.”

This is the part where I recount that, fittingly, rugby sevens — a quickstep half of traditional rugby, seven aside and two seven-minute halves — was allegedly invented by a 19th-century Scottish butcher’s apprentice. There’s a cutthroat verisimilitude in that.

And these Canadians are tough, brassy lasses. As far from delicate flowers and pearl-clutching neurotics as one can get.

So if they complain about bullying, about harassment from a male coach, surely there’s more to it than a superficial whinge or revenge of the timid. Thirty-seven women, all involved in the centralized training program in Sanford, B.C., signed a statement released in late April decrying the absolving of former coach John Tait on accusations of harassment and bullying.

A third-party investigation ordered by Rugby Canada had concluded that Tait was not guilty of any breaches of the federation’s policy, although he stepped down anyway, claiming his job had become untenable under the circumstances and urging Rugby Canada to publicly release the report.

“We feel that the process failed to protect us and did not acknowledge the abuse and harassment that we believe we suffered,” Landry wrote in the statement, because she’s their calming veteran captain-leader and the pith of women’s rugby in Canada — her 41 points helped lift the maple leaf flag to bronze at the Rio Games, and she’s the all-time leading scorer of the World Series with 1,356 career points.

It was a messy parting of the ways between the players and Tait with blowback flying in all directions, women’s rugby plunged into crisis just as it was reaching a level of unprecedented support and participation. Because girls see it and say, as Wardley did: I want to do that.

The full report hasn’t been publicly released and likely will never be, given the assurance of privacy rights that encouraged alleged victims to speak. The conclusion was that “while conduct described in the complaint reflects the experience of the athletes,” it did not breach the organization’s policies.

You know, how people remember stuff differently — same alibi our prime minister used about his purported groping of a young female reporter way, way, way back in the day.

In defensive posture, Rugby Canada has since approved and updated its safe sport policy manual and promised a further independent assessment of women’s sevens and other programs “to help us understand the journey and experiences of our athletes and staff involved with our national teams.” Sounds like a mouthful of deniability wool.

It’s impossible to know the specifics of what the women alleged. In the April statement the players said their formal complaint “explained the psychological abuse, harassment and/or bullying these athletes feel they were subjected to.”

For his part, in the duelling statements, Tait said: “It is shameful and beyond misleading for these athletes to be portraying themselves as victims in regards to how I or the program treated them.”

And did we mention the positive COVID tests upon returning from five weeks of training and competing in Dubai?

It’s been a slog of a row to hoe.

The team members haven’t been shy about raising their woke voices in Tokyo either. At a virtual Sunday press conference, the 13 women — all wearing matching black T-shirts inscribed with “BIPOC Lives Matter” and red face masks that stated “Every Child Matters” — they issued statements on racial equality, the discovery of remains of Indigenous children in unmarked graves at or near residential schools, and each introduced themselves by their preferred pronouns.

The consensus on one matter is abundantly clear: pleasure and relief that seasoned coach Mick Byrne, a 62-year-old Aussie, is now at the helm. (Australia is the Olympic defending champion.)

“He’s one of the best rugby coaches in the world,” enthused Landry. “His knowledge is second to none. We were so fortunate that he was able to step in and help us get here and, I think, elevated our game.”

The 33-year-old added, of Byrne’s immediate impact: “The biggest transition, obviously, there’s a lot to work on in the system.” The bureaucracy of the national rugby program, she meant, and deaf ear turned to escalating complaints as the women have accused. “But for us, he was such a positive influence coming into training. I’ve been at this game for a long time and I felt like a kid again, learning rugby in a new way.”

Her teammates apparently feel the same way. It’s an energized and optimistic Canadian squad in Pool B — with Brazil, France and Fiji — contesting this tournament of 12 teams, three days of competition culminating in medal matches on Super Saturday at the Games. Six players from that Rio team are back, vying in Tokyo. It’s a deep squad, hoping for a glitterier outcome that five years ago, with Australia and New Zealand top-ranked. When the pandemic forced suspension of the season last year, Canada was third in the World Rugby Sevens Series.

On this fine afternoon at Tokyo Stadium, the third-seeded Canadians came out maybe a bit tight — their first real game since February 2020, after all. Full chops to the Brazilian defence for holding them off that long: until nearly six minutes in, when speedster Charity Williams finessed around it to open the scoring. Canada romped onwards to a 33-0 win, Landry making four of the five extra-point conversions.

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“Credit their speed and fitness,” said Landry afterward. “They made us work really hard.”

In the late-afternoon match, Fiji got the better of Canada, 26-12. Then France blanked the Canadian women 31-0, leaving them in third place in their group and waiting to see if they will move on.

But they’re mostly, immensely, gratifyingly glad to put the politics and the upheaval behind them, battling on the pitch against a real opponent, not the teammate-pretend kind of pandemic lockdowns.

“The training has been so hard,” said their esteemed captain. “But it’s such a reward to get out there and put it all together. When the seas part, it’s magic for us.”

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno