France just won the first Olympic rugby game since 1924
For 92 years, the United States has been the reigning Olympic rugby champion — a feat that gets a little less impressive when you find out rugby has been discontinued from the Olympics since 1924.
At the Paris Games that year, France was considered to be due a rugby win, and the U.S. was prepared to give it to them. "We were told to go to Paris and take our beatings like gentlemen," said Norman Cleaveland, a player on the American team. Instead, the inexperienced and recently seasick Americans somehow pulled a 17-3 win, after which rugby was canceled for nearly a century.
In Rio this year, rugby is finally back, albeit in a streamlined form called rugby sevens, and the French women's team won the first match against Spain, 24-7, Saturday morning. The win potentially puts them on track to make up for that loss in Paris decades ago, though Australia and New Zealand are the current favorites. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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