There haven’t been many rugby sevens matches quite like the quarter-final between France and Argentina, haven’t, in all honesty, been many Olympic moments quite like it either. France won it 26-14, their last, match-winning, try, a spectacular solo tap-and-go scored by (who else but?) Antoine Dupont. But it wasn’t the action that made the occasion, good as it was, but the atmosphere around it. There were 80,000 French fans in the Stade de France, and they made a racket that carried out of the ground and right around the city.
The poor old Argentinians were on the hook for the racist chants their football team aimed at the French players during the recent Copa América, and they were booed and hooted and jeered every time they touched the ball. Relations between the two countries have become so strained that Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has arranged to meet Emmanuel Macron in Paris this weekend in an effort to lessen the tensions between them.
Which was just about the last thing the French players, and everyone else in the Stade, had in mind on Thursday night. Instead, they belted out La Marseillaise as their team ripped into a 21-0 lead. Andy Timo scored their first, the lightning-quick Aaron Grandidier Nkanang their second and third. Great Britain’s men may not have qualified for the competition, but there’s still a little English influence here, Grandidier Nkanang was born and raised in London, and even played for the English Counties U18 team before he moved to France.
Argentina pulled one back early in the second half, but the game really lurched their way when France’s Jordan Sepho was shown a yellow card. Argentina scored a second, and all of a sudden there was only one try in it. But Dupont was on now, and he did an expert job of shepherding his team downfield before finishing the job off with his final try after the buzzer. So France’s live-action experiment in the great man theory of history is going to roll on into the semi-finals on Saturday, where they will play South Africa.
Dupont chose to switch to sevens all by himself, just for the hell of it and the prospect of a medal. It’s been a two-year project, he had to skip this year’s Six Nations, and balanced fit his commitments with the sevens team around Toulouse’s run to a league and cup double. In between, he helped France (who didn’t even manage to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics) to win a tournament on the sevens circuit for the first time since 2005. It’s helped that he knows some of the players from way back, the captain, Paulin Riva, was at Auch with him, and his older brother Clément, back in the early 2010s.
If Dupont’s France are going to win this thing, they’ll have to find a way past Fiji, who haven’t been beaten in Olympic competition yet. Across 2016, 2020, and the first two days of competition in 2024, their record is played 16, won 16. In all that time, no one has ever even got within five points of them until Ireland, who were next on, lost their own quarter-final against them 19-15. They were 15-7 up at one point, but Fiji are as irresistible as the tide, you may as well by trying to tackle the waves when they’re in flow, and they scored twice in a minute to win it.
Fiji had a rough couple of years in the run-up to the Games, under the direction of the old England player and coach Ben Gollings. They sacked him in March, and replaced him with Osea Kolinisau, who was their captain when they won the gold in Rio. Kolinisau’s first move was to bring back their legendary 35-year-old Jerry Tuwai, who has already won two gold medals, but who had been dropped by Gollings because of concerns about his fitness. Kolinisau says he has got them playing the “Fijian way: high tempo and high risk”. France played them in the final match of the group stage, and lost by seven.
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Fiji meet Australia, 18-0 victors over USA while France will need to get past South Africa, who their fans also booed. The Blitzboks beat New Zealand 14-7 in their quarter-final, thanks, in large part, to the irresistible form of their skipper Selvyn Davids, who scored one try by breaking two tackles and made the other with by running the length of the field.
Rugby sevens has always seemed a slightly odd fit at the Olympics. At Rio, it was held in a ramshackle little ground built out of scaffolding in a paddock outside the city, in Tokyo it was, like everything else, played in an empty stadium, which wasn’t much fun for anyone. But it has found its place here in Paris.
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