Atmosphere
The Hong Kong Rugby Sevens is traditionally one of if not the biggest event on the Hong Kong sporting calendar. As such, there is a tremendous party atmosphere, with the involvement of the entire rugby-playing community. A one-day women's tournament, The Cable&Wireless Worldwide Hong Kong Women's Rugby Sevens, precedes the men's contests. Under the auspices of the Hong Kong Mini Rugby Football Union, children with local clubs aged between 6 to 12 years play tournaments before the main matches each day. They also take part in the March Past immediately before the semi-final round.
For spectators, particular emphasis on the South Stand, where hordes of rugby fans dress up and dance for most of the duration. Activities that typically ensue as the weekend progresses include the throwing of empty beer jugs around the South Stand, Mexican waves, and streakers running across the pitch. Outside the stadium, the 'Sevens Village' at the Indian Recreation Club nearby is an alternative venue to gather and watch matches on giant screens, eat and drink to excess while matches are in progress; and after the match, partying continues with champagne and live music and DJs in the champagne tent.
Since 2007 the South Stand has been made officially accessible to over-18s only, due to its hyper and somewhat provocative atmosphere. Streakers were formally arrested. In addition, following an incident in 2010 when one spectator invaded the pitch, climbed onto the crossbars at the south end of the stadium before dodging back into the stands and disappearing, organisers stepped up security and announced a zero-tolerance policy of invaders in 2011. Out of concerns for safety, the local Rugby Union sent out notification that anyone entering the playing area who should not enter would be arrested by the police, instead of just being ejected from the arena.
Read more about this topic: Hong Kong Sevens
Famous quotes containing the word atmosphere:
“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”
—Walter Pater (18391894)
“The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.”
—George Orwell (19031950)
“Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)