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The Moscow News. Move over Usain Bolt, there's a new sheriff in town
Move over Usain Bolt, there's a new sheriff in town. Russians are going mad for - of all things - rugby, with more than 100,000 tickets sold for the three-day World Cup Sevens at Luzhniki next weekend. That compares to a meager 44,000 tickets sold so far for the World Athletics Championships, which run for a whole eight days in August. Rugby union has quietly become one of Russia's most popular sports, unnoticed by many and certainly without the help of TV. At pre-tournament training for New Zealand's sevens side on Sunday, the All Blacks were stunned by the crowd of locals, most of them young, who flocked to the Slava Stadium at Novoslobodskaya to see them. The autograph hunters were mostly young and hugely knowledgeable, and many of them were female. "It's such a big event for Russian rugby. It should be a real breakthrough for its development," said one of the fans there, Mikhail. "It's a great chance to interest people in rugby, to increase the number of spectators." New Zealand's men come into the World Cup as favorites and reigning champions in the annual tournament series for sevens teams. But the Kiwis have been favorites before and have not won the World Cup since 2001, prompting the sportswriter's cliche of a "jinx" on the team.
© RIA Novosti. / Sergey Guneev Russian rugby players in Monino The other contenders for the title in Moscow include teams as diverse as England, Fiji and Kenya, while the Russians are outsiders but feared for their power and strength. Russia's hopes may be stronger in the women's tournament, also at Luzhniki, where their stars include feared former goatherd Baizat Khamidova and ex-volleyball player Nadia Yarmotskaya. Mikhail, the fan from the training session, typifies how rugby has grown from the ground up here. Now in his mid-20s, he says: "I have been playing since my first year at school... It's almost like a way of life." Russia's rugby clubs are just that - clubs. With their shared identity and culture, they are uniting players and fans from the youngest kids' teams to the senior sides that play in the 10-team national professional league. Most of Russia's top rugby clubs date from the late 1960s and 1970s, not long after the Stalin-era ban on the "bourgeois" sport ended. They had to start from scratch and have done an admirable job. Outside Moscow, rugby has captured whole cities neglected by traditional Russian sports. Monino in the Moscow Region is building a 12,500-seat rugby stadium, enough to accommodate most of the town. In Siberia, Krasnoyarsk's million-plus population have never had a decent football or hockey team, but they have two pro rugby sides and regularly pack out the city's main stadium to see them play each other. Rugby's future in Russia looks bright, helped by an infusion of government money since its return to the Olympics was confirmed in 2009. The World Cup could be the spark for nationwide popularity, turning the sport's decades of under-the-radar growth into a broader phenomenon. Head to Luzhniki next weekend and you could see history in the making - and not just on the pitch.
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