Beijing Sport Bureau to spend HK$1m for training tour to New Zealand
Players, coaches to learn from world’s finest exponents of the game and their peerless handler Tietjens
Beijing is to invest more than a million HK dollars to send a group of players and coaches to New Zealand to learn the art of sevens from the world's finest exponents of the game, including mastermind Gordon Tietjens.
Thirty-five emerging sevens players - 18 women and 17 men - and 11 coaches will spend a month in New Plymouth, Taranaki, in November.
"The opportunity to train in New Zealand is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which every rugby player would die for," national sevens coach Johnny Zhang Zhiqiang said. "To learn skills and experience from the world's best will be a unique opportunity, and learning from the master, Gordon Tietjens, will be invaluable."
As China stake their claim at the HSBC Asian Sevens Series in Shanghai this weekend, the group from Xiannongtan Athletics School is looking much further ahead as part of a programme to develop high-performing international-class athletes.
The trip is being funded by the Beijing Sport Bureau and will cost one million yuan (HK$1.22 million). It follows the lead of provincial teams across China, all desperate to build viable sevens programmes as the Olympic superpower looks to the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro when sevens will be a medal sport.
Teams from Shandong, Jiangsu and Anhui have already been overseas for training (Shandong and Jiangsu to New Zealand, while Anhui went to Fiji), but the deal brokered between Beijing and the Taranaki Rugby Football Union is set to be the most significant, according to Zhang, a former sevens player who also captained China for many years.