Is rugby an Olympic sport?

The Paris 2024 Olympic Video games formally begins on Friday twenty sixth July with the opening ceremony on the Rive Seine.

The French capital will welcome the world’s biggest athletes for the world’s greatest sporting occasion with over 10,000 athletes from 206 nations collaborating in 329 occasions in 32 completely different sports activities throughout the subsequent two and a half weeks.

For rugby followers, nevertheless, the query shall be is rugby an Olympic sport and, if that’s the case, the place and who can I watch?

Is rugby an Olympic sport?

Fiji win gold in the course of the Males’s Rugby Sevens on the 2016 Rio Summer time Olympic Video games. (Picture By Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile through Getty Photographs)

Sure, rugby is an Olympic sport. Not within the full 15-a-side model of the sport however within the shortened, thrilling format of rugby sevens.

Rugby Sevens was launched to the Olympics Video games at Rio 2016. Fiji males received the nation’s first-ever gold medal – males’s or girls’s  – by beating Group GB, who took silver. South Africa secured bronze over Japan. Australia received gold within the girls’s occasion whereas New Zealand took silver and Canada took bronze.

In Tokyo 2020, Fiji males defended their title with New Zealand taking silver and Argentina taking bronze. New Zealand girls earned gold, France took silver and Fiji took bronze.

Curiously, the 15-a-side union format of the sport was an Olympic sport however was final featured 100 years in the past. A males’s occasion debuted on the 1900 Video games, additionally in Paris, with residence aspect France taking gold. The final 15s medal was awarded on the 1924 Sport, once more in Paris, with the USA taking the title.

Because of this the defending Olympic champions in rugby union are technically the USA.

Rugby on the Paris 2024 Olympics: Have to know

Rugby Sevens captains at Paris 2024 Olympic Video games (Getty Photographs)

Paris 2024 will see 12 males’s and 12 girls’s groups compete in Rugby Sevens for gold. The lads’s event begins on Wednesday twenty fourth July with the medals being selected Saturday twenty seventh July. The ladies’s occasion takes place from Sunday twenty eighth July by way of to Tuesday thirtieth July.

Under are guides on the right way to watch all of the occasions reside:

The occasion will happen within the Stade de France, host to final 12 months’s males’s Rugby World Cup last.

Each competitions will see have three swimming pools of 4 groups compete to enter the knockout section. There’ll then be 1 / 4 last, semis, last and third-place bronze medal play-off.

The primary males’s recreation shall be Australia vs Samoa at 14:30 BST on Wednesday twenty fourth whereas the ladies’s competitors begins with Eire vs Group GB at 14:30 BST on Sunday twenty eighth.

The lads’s bronze medal match takes place at 18:00 BST on Saturday twenty seventh July, adopted by the gold medal match at 18:45 BST – the primary medals to be awarded at Paris 2024. The ladies’s medals matches will then happen on the similar time on Tuesday thirtieth July.

Rugby on the Paris 2024 Olympics: Groups

There shall be 12 nations collaborating in each the lads’s and girls’s competitors. France are among the many favourites for the lads’s title because of the inclusion of 15s star Antoine Dupont. Australia and New Zealand shall be joint-favourites for girls’s gold.

Associated: Seven gamers to observe on the Paris 2024 Olympic Video games rugby sevens

Group GB will compete within the girls’s occasion however are lacking from the lads’s competitors resulting from dropping to South Africa in final month’s repechage.

Paris 2024 Olympic Video games rugby sevens males’s groups:

• Argentina
• Australia
• Fiji
• France
• Eire
• Japan
• Kenya
• New Zealand
• Samoa
• South Africa
• United States
• Uruguay

Paris 2024 Olympic Video games rugby sevens girls’s groups:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• China
• Fiji
• Group GB
• Eire
• Japan
• New Zealand
• South Africa
• United States

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