The Rugby League World Cup is an international rugby league football tournament contested by national teams of members of the Rugby League International Federation (RLIF). It has been held nearly once every 4 years on average since its inaugural tournament in France in 1954. This was the first World Cup of either rugby code and the first competition to be officially known as the "Rugby World Cup".
The most recent tournament was contested in Australia in 2008 and was won by New Zealand for the first time. In the thirteen tournaments held to date, three nations have won the competition (Australia nine times, Great Britain three times and New Zealand once) out of the seventeen total teams who haven taken part. Australia, France and New Zealand are the only teams to have played in all tournaments, with Great Britain being split into England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland since 1995. The next competition in 2013 will be in England, France, Ireland and Wales and will form part of the UK's 'Golden Decade of Sport'
Since 2000, the RLIF has also organised World Cups for Women, Students and other categories.
Read more about Rugby League World Cup: History, Format, Awards
Famous quotes containing the words league, world and/or cup:
“Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be—I hope it is—redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)
“Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging over it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)