Mission Possible: GB Rugby Sevens going for gold in Tokyo

The postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games due to the impact of Covid-19 wreaked havoc for athletes across the world.

Some athletes had hard-earned qualification spots taken away, others suffered drastic drops in form, and for some it led to an early retirement.

The situation looked particularly bleak for Great Britain’s Olympic Rugby Sevens side, with the entire team losing its funding at the end of August as the Rugby Football Union (RFU) faced up to potential losses of £107m in the wake of the pandemic.

Captain Tom Mitchell led the GB side to a silver medal when Sevens made its Olympic bow at Rio 2016, but admitted the loss of funding left him questioning his career.

“There’s a sense in professional sport that because it’s a wonderful career for a lot of people that do it, you want to hold onto it for as long as you can,” Mitchell commented in an interview with Calacus.

“But I think that can be a dangerous route to go down as you don’t want to end up in a place where you’re not enjoying it or you’re not performing at your best.

“I did assess when I had a bit of time off in lockdown. I was taking training easy for a bit thinking am I going to keep doing this, because you can’t go into an Olympic campaign half-baked.

“You need to be fully committed to it and I was glad I had that reflection because actually it meant that by the time I made the decision I was very much into it.

“So in some ways having the space to reflect on what was important to me, and it turned out this journey was in that category, it’s put me in a much better place now.”

The key turning point for Mitchell and his teammates came in December when it was announced that the National Lottery would provide funding for the full 2021 season.

It put an end to months of uncertainty and meant the team could focus on their goal of competing at the Tokyo Olympic Games.

“The really hard thing to process initially was the fact that we’d been building towards the Olympic Games and it got shifted back a year, but there was no bridge to go to the new date,” Mitchell explained.

“We still had the dream of going to Tokyo, but at that stage [in August] it seemed like we had no way of doing it because there was no team to be a part of, no training to go to, no support structure, and the rest of it.

“Those combinations of things made it quite a difficult time, but it did also light a fire under the group and there was a lot of really good work that went on trying to be proactive about finding solutions.

“I think part of that was rewarded, although the funding from the National Lottery wasn’t from anything that the playing group had done, the fact people had stayed the course and kept working and training showed our commitment.”

For many minority Olympic sports, the constant challenge is increasing the profile of their activities and competitions outside of an Olympic window.

While there has been increased coverage of a wider range of sports in many UK publications in recent years, Mitchell believes the onus is as much on the players and staff to promote their individual sports.

“This is something we tried to pick up on when the England Sevens programme got shut down last summer, questioning whether we had done enough as a sport.

“It’s up to us as players to make enough noise about the sport and to get it out there. I think a lot of people are realising, not just us but World Rugby as well, that there are great stories to be told in Sevens and they’ve not been told particularly well in recent years.

“There’s a lot of ingredients into that, the season structure, how difficult it can be to follow teams around the world and actually putting the season together in a way that fans can digest is all something they’re going to look at.

“We’ve not had a Sevens team social media account since I’ve been playing until we started this new programme and now they’re putting out some great content.

“We’ve got a cameraman in with us full time at the moment so he’s capturing bits and pieces behind the scenes, doing interviews with people, getting bits of training. Mission Possible is our tagline for the GB Sevens programme and also the title of the series.

“I think the videos are really well put together at the moment and it’s only going to get better. In rugby, particularly at the national level, there’s been a bit of a tendency to probably try and sanitise the output a little bit, but there’s been a good shift in a lot of areas to portray a bit more of a realistic picture of players.”

Mitchell expects an entirely different experience in Tokyo this summer compared to the festival atmosphere that Sevens has previously provided in World Series events and in Rio five years ago.

It remains to be seen if local Japanese spectators will be permitted to attend the Games, but for the GB team that is just an external factor outside of their control.

You can be sure that regardless of whether fans are allowed there will be no shortage of motivation in the ranks after the year they’ve had to endure.