Sevens rugby is already a parallel universe; it is to rugby what theatresports is to theatre or yoghurt is to milk, a refined subculture with a life of its own. Add to that, this is women's sevens rugby. In the Olympics. Played in the dusty backblocks of Rio de Janeiro. And Brazil are playing Japan. Can this be happening? This is the Olympic multiplier effect applied to reality.
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If this is a dream come true it is, as the surrealist South American writer Julio Cortazar phrased it, the realisation of a dream that never happened, a surreal twist on an improbable idea.
Equal parts greatest show on earth and club gala day, the rugby in the pool stages contains both the terrific and the terrible. The dreamlike feeling, like running flat-out without going forward, is enhanced when a Japanese player, held by the shorts, literally runs flat-out without going forward.
Stranger still is when Brazil score their first try. The crowd, which goes nuts when any Brazilian player so much as makes a tackle, is strangely muted as Paula Ishibashi (Brazilian captain,
Japanese descent, just to weird things out even more) plunges over the line. Nothing happens when the referee blows her whistle to signal the try. But when the five points go up on the scoreboard, there is pandemonium. Everything is on delay.
A Japanese supporter wearing a hachimaki and brandishing a rice-paper hand fan — a fan with a fan — eventually throws both down and slumps to his seat as his team bows out.
Who would not want to be part of it? Jarryd Hayne was onto something. The qualifying criterion for new Olympic sports is simple: they have to be fun.
The atmosphere at the makeshift Deodoro Stadium is definitely fun and festive. Noise and crowds at this level have not been seen in the Shute Shield since the days when Willie Jephcott, Charlie Blunt and Laurie Monaghan ruled Chatswood Oval. But that was another reality and this is another century.
The morning's action proceeds through its international alphabet soup: Spain beat Kenya, New Zealand beat France, Brazil beat Japan, Britain beat Canada, and Fiji set world speed records against Colombia. By the time Australia take the field against the US, weirdness has passed through layers of weirdness and burst through the other side to feel like normality again.
Serious athletes, serious contest, and some bruising defence. With her first touch of the ball, Ellia Green is knocked into next week by a head clash (she is good enough to play in the men's tournament).
She leaves for a concussion test. Without her, the Australians lack an edge, and chain-pass from side to side without structure.
In the second half, the opportunistic Americans ambush the gold medal favourites with two tries, and lead 12-7 when the final hooter goes. It could be worse but for a corner-flagging cover tackle by Charlotte Caslick on her opposite number Victoria Foyalan.
The hooter has gone, but the ball is still alive. Emilee Cherry breaks the line 30 metres out and looks certain to score, but is pulled down a metre short, for Emma Tonegato to swoop onto the ball and stretch over for the try, her second of the match.
It remains for Chloe Dalton to convert to save the draw, 15 metres to the side of the posts and into a stiff breeze. Coach Tim Walsh sends Dalton a message: 'This is for the gold medal.' It isn't; it's not even for a spot in the quarter-finals, as Australia have already qualified.
But, Walsh says later, 'I wanted her to get used to that pressure and keep her head down.' Dalton does so, still looking down at her boot as the ball sails over, and the draw is secured.
'A kick up the pants that we needed,' Walsh says, all the way back to normality, which arrives in the form of a routine 24-0 dispatch of Spain in the quarter-finals. Having cleared her concussion test, Green returns as a second-half substitute to score the final try and set up a semi-final against Canada.
As the crowd empties out, the scaffold grandstand trembles, unless that was William Webb Ellis turning in his grave. Or would he? The supposed father of the game believed in revolution, not evolution.
After these games, this stadium will be dismantled and removed as if the whole thing had never happened. But the medals handed out to the winning athletes will be no less three-dimensional or hard-earned than any others in these Olympics.
'She was just massive - heavier than my Dad'
Charlotte Caslick won't say her name but she will tell you how big she was — because she can still remember the day she had to tackle her.
"I was invited to a camp, I was about 16 and there was a girl there who was just massive," the 21-year-old Queenslander recalls. "She was heavier than my Dad. At least 90 kilograms. I remember coming home and I'm like, 'Nup, I can't do this.' That freaked me out because I thought I had to be just like her."
And now?
Now, five years later, the former touch footy star is considered the best women's rugby sevens player on the planet.
Like several of her teammates in the Australian team, Caslick excelled at touch but received letters in the mail from Australian Rugby Union talent scouts after sevens was included in the Rio Olympics.
For that reason, the World Series champions are known for their attacking brand of play, but Caslick concedes the physicality of her new sport was difficult to fathom.
"I'm not going to lie: I struggled for a while getting my head around running at people as hard as I can, and tackling people running hard at me," she says. "That was the biggest area I had to work on. Hours and hours and hours in a sandpit in Brisbane. Just tackling each other, tackling the other girls. The more you do the better you get. I love contact now, it's one of my favourite parts of the game."
So, is she cutting rivals in half whenever they've got the ball?
"Not quite," she smiles. "But I'm not a dead weight."
For the record, she's 65 kilograms.
Australian coach Tim Walsh, who still shakes his head in disbelief that he's about to coach sevens rugby at an Olympics after accepting the job in 2013, remembers the difficulty in transforming the side's touch players into rugby stars.
"Some had never made a tackle before," Walsh says. "The majority hadn't done a drop kick before … I believe contact is 80 per cent desire, 20 per cent technique. The number of tears they had from making their first tackles to now … They really embrace it."
There were no tears from Nicole Beck, 28. She does cut them in half.
Search YouTube for her try-saving tackle on England's Fiona Pocock while playing for Australia at the 2010 World Cup. It evokes memories of Wallaby halfback George Gregan's famous tackle on the All Blacks' Jeff Wilson in 1994.
"Honestly? I was trying not to get palmed off," Beck says, trying to downplay the moment. "Run hard so she wouldn't be able to palm me."
It's been watched nearly half a million times on You Tube.
"I think my dad watched half of those …"
Beck is one of many great stories in this Australian side, which threatens to steal the show in the opening days of these Olympics. Having won the World Series earlier this year, they are considered the tournament favourites in Rio.
In 2011, she gave birth to her daughter, Sophie.
"That nine months off was a real motivator for me," Beck says. "I didn't like not playing my sport. I had a difficult birth with Sophie and I didn't start running again until she was seven months old. But that time off allowed me to get over an ankle injury."
Given the high intensity game the Australians play, she needed to be fully recovered.
"The field stays the same [as regular rugby], but you've got half as many people so aerobic fitness and endurance is everything. There's no rest. Everyone is surprised to hear it's only 14 minutes, but you are running non-stop, high speed metres. It's the most taxing sport I've ever played."
An interactive guide to Australia's best medal hopes as they go for Olympic gold.
From what moment in the game do the lungs start to burn?
"The first minute," she says. "The way we play, they're burning the whole time."
Emilee Cherry, 23, is a Roma girl who idolises hometown hero Darren Lockyer so much she still had a poster of him on the back of her bedroom door a few years ago.
"I play in the centres, I'm more of a running player than him, but I admired how he was composed in the big moments," she says.
Like Caslick, Cherry was running around with the national touch team when she received her letter from the ARU, prompting her to think about Rio.
"When I started there were girls who were 30-year-olds who had been playing [rugby] for most of their lives," she says. "They gave it to us at the start. Looking back now, I am really thankful that it was a shock. That is something we've learned to love: the contact.
"But we can do things they couldn't do. We taught them our skills from touch, our ball playing, we've shared ideas. Our game has developed from that touch football background. We like to use the ball."
Ellia Green doesn't so much use the ball as run it with Hayne-like devastation.
She fell into the sport when she took her cousin to a sevens camp and then found herself being selected. She had designs on being the 100m in track and field, never in rugby.
In the past year, her profile has soared. She's the most recognisable women's player in the country.
"It's just because I have braids," Green, 23, laughs. "I think our whole team is getting recognised more."
Should Australia cash in on their form this year, starting with Columbia and Fiji in the pool rounds on day one, the USA on day two and then possible gold on day three, the nation will know exactly who they are.
"I get goosebumps with you just saying that," Caslick says. "We want Australia to look at us as one of those teams that everyone wants to follow. Win the hearts of Australia, really."