PARIS — This is who plays Rugby Sevens for Canada at the Olympics.
The captain is Olivia Apps, who tried to run over the opposition just a month after a cougar attacked her near her Vancouver Island home. That didn’t slow her down. She played like she was on the attack Tuesday.
The veteran playing on the outside is Charity Williams, who had two different surgeons take a bite out of her legs — figuratively — the past two years and she wore a walking boot between games on Tuesday, just so she could be ready for the final.
The kids were the ones hugging and crying and crying and hugging: Sometimes silver medals are won. Sometimes second place isn’t good enough. The first silver medal ever won by the Canadian women in Rugby Sevens yesterday reminded me of a celebration diver Annie Pelletier went through years ago.
Pelletier held up her bronze medal with pride and said: “Does it look like gold to you? It looks like gold to me.”
This silver looked every bit like gold to a Canadian team that has been drawn and quartered, chopped up by surgeons and animals, missing three starters from a team where only seven start, and they were a half away from pulling off an impossible dream of sorts in a sport in which you blink and miss all the drama.
They didn’t beat New Zealand in a final that wasn’t supposed to be close. But they did lead at halftime of the world’s fastest sport. Rugby Sevens is sport on fast forward. Too much happens in too short a time. The game is 14 minutes long. This is Blue Jays in 30 in half the time.
And the Canadian team, picked by nobody to win a medal here, having started the first day of rugby with a 33-7 loss to eventual gold medal winner New Zealand, came from ninth place in the world to second at the Olympics, losing to the same New Zealand team 19-12 in the gold medal match.
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This was almost miracle on turf. They had a shot. They didn’t necessarily dominate the first seven minutes — yep, that’s a half — but they did have a lead.
And the Rugby Sevens world was in shock, for those few seconds, for as big as the Rugby Sevens world happens to be. On the field afterwards, the Canadian players hugged and cried and then hugged and cried some more, took pictures with their families, celebrated for as long as they could celebrate.
There are heartbreaking silver medal winners. There are silver medals that feel like defeat. This was a silver medal victory. There was no defeat for Canada at Stade de France not anywhere but the scoreboard.
There was only joy and excitement. And over time, when perspective sets in, this day and these moment will get grow even larger in time.
“The whole day has been like a dream, I’m still in shock,” said Caroline Crossley, the Canadian player. “Afterward I just cried, mostly cried. I put the medals around their (families) neck. It’s every bit theirs as it mine.”
The win meant so much for Charity Williams, the speedy Canadian who ran for a brilliant try in the semifinal victory over favoured Australia. The win went so much for her because she’s the only holdover from the bronze medal winning team in Brazil eight years ago.
“I think in the end we played our hearts out,” she said. “The game of Sevens is uncontrollable. You’ve got to love it and you’ve got to hate it. Nobody expected us to be on the podium.”
And that’s heard all the time these days in sports: Nobody expected us to be here. It isn’t nonsense. This time it wasn’t.
This time, it was truth almost across the board. Canada wasn’t supposed to win silver. The Americans weren’t supposed to win bronze. The teams in second and third cried far more in defeat and victory than the actual favourites, who won.
Williams now has a silver medal from here and a bronze from Rio and she hints she might be back for another Olympics. “I do need all three colours,” she said. Gold is the one missing.
That sounds ambitious on this day of victory, with emotions running wild, in a stadium larger than anything any of these players have ever performed in before.
Next week, track and field will take over the Stade and Athletics, as it usually does, will take over the Games. But in the boiling heat of Sunday afternoon and Sunday evening, there was Canadian cool and a sport that so many of us do not know was worthy of attention.
Canada now has six medals in Paris, the Rugby Sevens silver being the least expected of them all.