Tusker Safari Sevens – Kenyans come home

With the rise of the Kenyan national sevens team in recent years to become one of the real forces in the IRB World Series, it would seem natural that a series of tournaments in the team’s home nation would also emerge as a training ground for future players. This is certainly the case in the other major seven-playing nations such as South Africa, England, New Zealand and even the USA.

In Kenya, although there is only one such tournament, only one tournament where the beloved supporters of the Kenya sevens team can see their heroes play at home and that is the Tusker Safari Sevens in Nairobi.

Although he is the only standard bearer for rugby sevens in Kenya, what a standard bearer the nation has, drawing teams from all over the world to sample the wonderfully pure pleasures of one of the great countries and cities of the African continent. Sevens teams have always been scouring the globe in search of that tournament that excites and captivates the mind both on and off the pitch and that is exactly what Safari Sevens aims to do.

John Hooper, who toured with Samurai International at the Safari Sevens in 2008, remembers arriving the morning of the tournament. “We were literally in the oldest minibus you’d ever seen, driving down a road that couldn’t be described as a road, it felt like we were literally on Safari and not playing rugby in the Safari Sevens.” Although all the Samurai players were thinking ‘where are we?’ on that first morning, Hooper goes on to say, “then he turned up, the pitch at Ngong Road had literally thousands of fans around him and it became very obvious that we were there to play rugby.”

That’s what’s special about Safari Seven, it’s very African. Exactly how you want a tournament to be when you hit foreign soil as a touring team. You don’t want a tournament that simply mimics other tournaments as many have attempted when trying to replicate the world famous Hong Kong and Dubai sevens. When this happens, the sense of the commercial reality in which rugby sevens operates becomes all too apparent. Tournaments and their organizing committees forget what made teams come to their tournament in the first place, the fact that they are in a different part of the world wanting to sample different cultures while playing rugby sevens.

Safari Sevens does not forget this; in fact, in the eyes of the IRB this is to their detriment. It doesn’t run like a commercial machine, it has taken the ‘build it and they will come’ approach and it works. The spectators are passionate about rugby and their Kenyan team (it gives them something to cheer for besides the drag races) they know the sport too but when you arrive you know this is a special place, this is not your sevens tournament everyday. .

In the long term, the tournament organizers would like to see the Safari Seven in the IRB World Series, but the “hidden gem” nature of this tournament is such that while this makes it so unique for teams to compete outside of the World Series (this year Samoa & Fiji are competing) means it doesn’t fit the commercial expectations of a series that includes places like Twickenham, Petco Park and ‘The Sevens’ in Dubai on its menu.

This is not to say that we won’t see Safari Sevens in the series one day and if they do it right I’m sure it will be one of the most popular. Finding that mix of commercial success (on an international scale) without losing what brought the teams to Nairobi in the first place will not be easy, but if it is achieved, one of the great sports competitions will be born.