22 Sep /16

Rugby

Rugby – Word of the day - EVS Translations
Rugby – Word of the day – EVS Translations

The Rio Olympics re-introduced two sports to the official list of the summer Olympic sports – golf and rugby. Re-introduced, as both are not really new additions, golf and rugby were first played at the Summer Olympics in Paris in 1900, with golf to be removed after the next St. Louis 1904 Games and rugby to stay in the Olympic Games until Paris 1924.

And while 1924 saw a fifteen player version of rugby union playing 40-minutes halves, the International Olympic Committee voted to re-introduce the seven-a-side version with seven players playing seven-minutes halves for the Rio, along with the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Games.

The sevens model originated in Scotland in the 1883, as a fund-raising event for a local club, to gain certain international recognition in the 1930 and a fair global popularity nowadays.

And while there are historical evidences of the existence of rugby football resembling sport activities played by the Romans and Greeks, the rugby, as we know it, developed in the 1830s in one of the oldest private schools in Britain, the Rugby School, when running with the ball while playing football became common.

The first known set of written rules comes from 1845, followed by the formation of the Football Association in 1863 and the first rugby clubs, to 1871 when the Rugby Football Union was formed and the first international rugby union match played between the Scotland and England national rugby unions.

The Field Magazine reported on the first general meeting of the Rugby Football Union in its 22nd July issue, yet the first use of the word rugby, itself, comes from 1852, from the 17 October issue of the leading chronicler of the English sporting scene, Bell’s Life in London, and sporting chronicle, which indicates that the chronicle had, by the time, published numerous articles on the newly developing variant of football: I hear that many speculations are hazarded to guess who puts these Rugby football pieces in Bell. “

20 years later, Bell reported the next Scotland against England rugby match, attracting 4000 spectators and ending with a 0-0 draw as: “one of the jolliest, one of the most spirited and most pleasant matches that have ever been played according to association rules.”

Moving fast forward, nearly a century and a half after the jolliest match, the last Olympics saw how the male team of the country, where rugby was invented, was defeated at the finals by Fiji, and the Great Britain’s female team scoring behind Canada, New Zealand and Australia.