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HONG KONG: Hong Kong’s famous seven-game rugby tournament was postponed on Thursday (December 17) next April to November due to continued uncertainty about the coronavirus after it was completely eliminated this year.
The Hong Kong Sevens, which is the highlight of the world sevens circuit and helped inspire the sport’s inclusion in the Olympics, will now take place from November 5-7.
The vibrant tournament, an annual event from 1976 to this year, was last held in April 2019, meaning it will have been absent for more than two and a half years when it finally returns.
Organizers said the fourth wave of infections in Hong Kong, and similar problems in other parts of the world, led them to move the event to November.
READ: Hong Kong to Receive Sinovac, Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccines in Q1
“Given rising infection rates both at home and abroad, and ongoing travel and quarantine restrictions, the environment was deemed to remain too uncertain to support the organization of the event next April,” Hong Kong Rugby said. Union and World Rugby in a statement.
HKRU CEO Robbie McRobbie hoped that launching vaccines around the world would help ease travel restrictions, allowing teams and thousands of foreign fans to visit.
“We hope that global vaccination efforts can support the reduction of travel quarantines and local collection restrictions and allow us to host the kind of sevens that fans around the world are used to,” he said.
Hong Kong is now scheduled to be the last leg of the world series from 2020 to 2021. Details of the other tournaments have yet to be announced after the firsts of the season were canceled in the United Arab Emirates and South Africa, followed by stops in Australia and New Zealand.
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