The Pacific island nation and its raucous fans both deserve gold.
RIO DE JANEIRO — They came from a series of tiny specks in the Pacific and completely dominated the world.
Fiji’s team won the first ever men’s Olympic rugby sevens tournament Thursday night with a crushing 43-7 victory over a slightly bigger set of islands, Great Britain. It was a stunning display of power, speed and grace.
"I'm a little bit lost for words," said Fiji’s coach, Ben Ryan. "The boys were on another scale of phenomenal."
I watched their semifinal victory over Japan next to Japanese journalists. I have never heard a human make the noises they made as Fiji’s men tore through the Japanese squad in every way possible — niftily juking them, violently trucking them, viciously tackling them, even deftly throwing behind-the-back passes to provide better lanes to score.
The celebrations in Fiji have been raucous. The Guardian reported on massive watch parties and jubilation in the streets of the tiny island. As one islander said, the sport is Fiji’s religion.
"Go crazy, go nuts, you deserve this," said Osea Kolinisau. "This victory is for all of Fiji and the Pacific Islands."
There is a love story between this nation and this specific sport, one of the few it is specifically capable of succeeding in on an international level. Fiji had never won any sort of Olympic medal — before Tuesday, the only time one of the 14 Pacific island nations had was when Tonga’s Paea Wolfgramm won boxing silver in 1996.
To better understand the impossibility of a tiny island nation putting together a team that is the best in the world at something, consider Fiji’s soccer team. They qualified for the Olympics on a fluke — New Zealand had a player who actually hadn’t become a New Zealand citizen yet, so the whole team was disqualified, leaving Oceania’s spot to Fiji. And they were promptly outscored 23-1 in just three games, including a 10-0 loss to Germany.
But Fiji’s rugby sevens team didn’t get to Rio on a technicality, they got here by being a legitimate powerhouse. Rugby is life in Fiji.
"Before we start walking, we’re playing with a rugby ball," says Etu Baravilala.
When the Olympics accepted rugby sevens into their program as opposed to the more established versions of the sport, the reasons were mainly logistical. Sevens is a 14-minute game, and you can play a whole tournament in three days. On the other hand, a full rugby union game takes 80 minutes, and the World Cup takes a month and a half to complete. For the sport to fit in the Olympic fortnight, it had to be sevens.
Fiji’s 15-man teams are fine — they’re ranked 10th in the world in rugby union, and made the quarterfinals of the 2007 World Cup — but it’s simply harder for a tiny nation to compete in a game where you need twice as many athletes to be good. Since sevens is played on the same pitch as rugby union, speed is a doubly valuable commodity, which is fine for Fiji.
But a quirk about sevens is that it’s not played as frequently or locally as other variants of rugby. There are no big professional leagues. The main competition is the World Rugby Sevens Series, where national teams play 10 tournaments in various locations across the world, like Dubai, London, Sydney, Singapore and Las Vegas.
Notice that none of these is Fiji. The nation actually doesn’t get a chance to watch its most successful team at home. To watch in person, they have to travel across the globe.
A diehard fan group known as the Blue Wiggers does this. They’re called the Blue Wiggers because ... they wear blue wigs. For the past 10 years, they’ve done everything they can to ensure that when Fiji’s rugby sevens team is playing somewhere, there are a few bright blue wigs in the stands.
Naomi Roberts, a Fijian who lives in Sydney, helps organize the Blue Wiggers. It took her two days to get to Brazil, going from Sydney to Wellington to Santiago to Rio. She admits the Blue Wigs are in part to get media to notice Fiji.
It works. I see television reporters swarming one group of Wiggers for an interview. And I guess I’m media, and I interviewed them too. Huh.
Etu Baravilala attends the game shirtless with shell necklaces and the word FIJI written across his chest. He gets shown on the stadium Jumbotron, and gets stopped for so many pictures that it must have taken a half-hour to leave the stadium.
Fiji is beautiful, but it doesn’t have oodles of natural resources to export, so it needs tourism to survive. Getting publicity — even if it’s just a rugby team winning a game while fans have a great time — helps. The prime minister of the nation, Frank Bainimarama, attended all three days of men’s sevens games in the stands with the fans, and told The Independent he truly believed the team’s performance would help the nation grow.
"Hopefully now our GDP will go up in the next couple of weeks," Bainimarama said. "Hopefully this win will put Fiji on the map. We will be a little tiny dot – but hopefully people will start looking for that dot."
(I am actually quite upset that I did not find the prime minister while interviewing people in the stands. Maybe he should have worn a blue wig.)
As Americans, we believe everything is sunshine and beaches in Fiji. And those things are there, which is why it’s a tourism destination. But there’s poverty amidst the paradise. We picture a nation that looks like the label on the Fiji Water bottles, but while we drink Fiji water, many Fijians do not have access to clean water.
The weakness of the country’s economy is reflected in the spectators who were capable of spending thousands of dollars to come to Rio. Almost all of them are Fijian-born but few of them live in Fiji. Everybody I talk to is an emigrant who now lives in Australia, New Zealand or America.
"People leave for better opportunity," says Roberts, who has worked in finance in Sydney.
Even Baravilala, the shirtless warrior, does not live in Fiji — he lives in Hawaii, where he helps organize youth rugby, and made the trip not for Fiji, but to watch his daughter, Bui, play for the American women’s rugby team.
But it’s not just general economic malaise — Fiji is recovering from a major natural disaster. In February, Fiji was hit by Cyclone Winston, the strongest storm ever to make landfall in the South Pacific. Tens of thousands were left homeless. In a country of less than a million, that’s a really huge percentage of the population.
The hope is that this win makes Fiji a better place. That thousands of people across the world watched, saw Fiji’s name and saw Fijians having a great time and thought, "Hey, I should go spend my money there!" And that thousands across Fiji, even in a tough time, remembered all the great things about Fiji.
"This is what we’ve been looking for," says Baravilala. "This is what can bring Fiji together. It always does."