Dazzling Dupont and France storm to gold in Olympic rugby sevens

Glory be, what a game. France won their first gold medal of the 2024 Olympics on Saturday night, in a ring-a-ding, rope-a-dope 28-7 victory against Fiji. It was all orchestrated by (who else but?) that man Antoine Dupont. He made one try and scored two more, in a performance that will go down in Olympic history.

He did it in front of a delirious crowd of almost 80,000 French fans, the largest assembled at a sevens game. President Emmanuel Macron was right there in the middle of them. You could just about make out the golden tint of the reflected glory beaming off his brilliant white teeth as he grinned down from the balcony.

No one really expected it, except, perhaps, Dupont himself. France found themselves in the strange position of being heavy underdogs. They were so hopeless four years ago that they did not even qualify for the Tokyo Games, and they were up against a Fiji team who had won both of the gold medals that had previously been awarded in this event and every one of the 17 matches they had played along the way. No one had ever even come within four points of beating them.

But as Thomas Carlyle’s great man theory holds, history can be explained largely by the impact of our heroes, and France sure had one of those. Everything changed when he came on at half-time.

After seven minutes, the scores were level at seven-all. Fiji made a fast start, which was sobering as the rain that fell on the opening ceremony on Friday night. Selestino Ravutaumada burst through Paulin Riva’s tackle and punched past Stephan Parez-Edo Martin, then cut an arc right across the centre of the pitch. The ball flickered on once, twice, more, and before France knew it, Joseva Talacolo had scored.

France drew level against the run of play when Andy Timo wriggled through a tackle and offloaded to Jefferson-Lee Joseph, who ran in under the posts. But make no mistake, they were up against it. Then it happened. After the break, the camera closed in on Dupont, waiting ready in the backfield. The ball broke loose to him from the restart and with his very first touch he gathered it in and set off down the wing. You could almost sense him making minute calculations about what to do next as he went, breakneck, towards the far corner, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 metres onwards.

He slipped by Jerry Tuwai, then tossed an overhead pass to Aaron Grandidier Nkanang on his inside shoulder just before he was bundled into touch. All of a sudden, the French seemed to have shed the queasiness that had affected them in the first half. They were irresistible, and everywhere.

Fiji, whose coach had promised before the match they would leave their opponents “chasing shadows” were powerless to do anything much about it. The French flickered too and fro around them, darting, dashing, cutting, thrusting.

Dupont scored a third try with a tap and go from close range, which as good as sealed the match, then he added a fourth off the back of a rolling maul, just to make sure. By then it was bedlam inside the Stade de France. It is a dry stadium for the duration of the Olympics, but you would never have guessed unless you tried to buy a beer. The creaky, aging stadium, was shaking so hard as the crowd bounced around it felt like the entire place was about to come tumbling down.

Rugby is supposed to be a team game, and there is no doubt that part of the reason why this experiment has worked so well for France is because Dupont brought so little of his own ego to it, but still, it has seldom looked so much like a solo sport as it did on Saturday night. Dupont took this game, which he has been playing only a few months, and, against the odds, he turned it the way he wanted it to go.

He met the moment in a way very few athletes have been capable of doing and he will be rewarded for it with a fame well beyond anything anyone in his sport has achieved before.