A decade on, and handover fears for the survival of the tournament under mainland sovereignty look so quaint
A 'great' and 'resilient' event that is guaranteed to end in a 'hangover' - that's how a cross-section of Hong Kong's movers and shakers summed up their feelings about how the world's most-famous sevens tournament has coped, adapted and survived almost a decade on since the handover of sovereignty from the UK to the mainland on July 1, 1997.
The happy rhyme of 'hangover' and 'handover' is no coincidence, agrees Noel Smyth, managing director of Delaney's pubs, which are closely associated with local rugby. 'It remains the one event on the sporting calendar that guarantees each and everyone the ultimate in sporting entertainment,' says Smyth. 'Sadly, the only downside is the hangovers and that's also guaranteed.'
There were plenty of doom and gloom-mongers willing to paint the bleakest future for the event as the handover approached. These party- poopers predicted the annual shindig would be consigned to the dustbin of history once all the gweilos had departed along with the last governor, Chris Patten.
The late South China Morning Post sports writer, Robin Parke, was among them. In a column preceding that 1997 tournament, he wrote: 'Just how much longer will the Sevens as we know them last?' And he questioned whether the Sevens could 'sail on unchallenged by the changes' that were coming.
How wrong he and the many other doubters have been, chortles InvestHK's director-general Mike Rowse, an avid spectator every year. Rowse says: 'Those who thought Hong Kong's way of life was going to be radically altered post-handover only need to come to the stadium in late March every year to witness how mistaken they were.'