Hong Kong's men's and women's rugby sevens teams are confident they can get past nemesis Japan in the fight for Asia's sole qualification place for the Rio Olympics. As they celebrated Olympic Day on Tuesday, commemorating the birth of the modern Olympic games, squad regulars Cado Lee Ka-to and Christy Cheng Ka-chi insisted they had reason to be optimistic ahead of Asia Rugby's Olympics qualification tournament, which will be hosted at a newly refurbished Hong Kong Stadium on November 7-8. Japan have continually thwarted Hong Kong's ambitions in sevens, and are likely to have their best players on display at So Kon Po, but Kowloon scrum-half Lee insisted: "Japan will be a very tough game [but] I don't think there is a huge gap between us and them." "There is a short amount of time to play in sevens [matches] and it comes down to the right decisions. We have to work on our moves and if we try our best against Japan, we will beat them. "The Olympics come along every four years, and as a team we are looking forward to participating ... and the qualifiers represent a good chance of being there. I would rank it very high among our priorities." As well as Japan, Hong Kong will face competition from the likes of South Korea, China, and the Philippines in the one-off 12-team regional qualifiers. Fiji, South Africa, New Zealand, England, USA and Argentina have already booked their trips to Rio in the men's competition, with hosts Brazil having automatic qualification. This leaves five more berths to be filled by the Asian, African, European and Oceania champions, plus the winners of a world-wide repêchage contest that will give Asia's runners-up one last chance to qualify, though they will no doubt be up against heavyweight teams from Europe, Oceania and Africa. Hong Kong's women face the extra challenge of playing a second qualifying leg in Tokyo, and teams from China, Kazakhstan and Japan all stand in their way. Vice-captain Cheng, however, was unfazed. "We are quite confident actually and it has been very close between China, Japan and us. We have played against Japan quite a lot, so we are familiar with them and know how to play against them. "We are actually quite similar in how we are not the biggest teams in the world, but have a bit of speed, so I think we have a really good chance. "We really showed the world what we can do [with an impressive Hong Kong Sevens performance] ... it showed the girls that we can actually do it," said Cheng.
