It’s seen Chabal dressed as a caveman and the Beach Boys giving Good Vibes, the Cathay/HSBC Hong Kong Sevens is rugby’s biggest party for good reason – there’s even some quality rugby to be had.
While Waisale Serevi will forever be the man associated with the rugby on the pitch at the Hong Kong Sevens, with his ball-spinning magic and otherworldly skillset going viral long before the days of social media, off the field, behind-the-scenes it’s a man with the most Scottish of names with whom it’s so closely associated.
Robbie McRobbie, the CEO of Hong Kong China Rugby, is about to oversee his final tournament having been part of the union for some twenty years, although his history with the event goes back even further. “I arrived as a 21-year-old police officer in 1992 and so my first few sevens were in the South Stands as a punter,” he explains. “Coming out to Hong Kong was an adventure, but then finding sevens took it to the next level.”
Impassioned by what he saw and experienced, he would join the union as a community rugby manager a decade later, before taking on the role of tournament director. “The only way to describe it, is that you feel like someone has entrusted you with the family heirloom and you just don’t want to mess it up,” he says. “There’s lots of things that contribute to the success of the Hong Kong Sevens, but it’s not like there’s a manual telling you how to make it successful. A lot of it is driven by the crowd, so you just tweak it a little bit better each time.”
The rugby pedigree is without question, name a player from any country, with a reputation for speed and skill, over the past forty years, and the odds are they’ve played here. Campese, Lomu, Cullen, Serevi, Ryder, Rush, Gregan, Habana, Muliainia, Pesamino – players so good, you only need to know their surnames.
It was started in 1976 by, as Robbie puts, ‘three blokes in a pub’, wanting to run a rugby tournament but without the budget for fifteens, and it’s rocketed into rugby’s bucket-list, even before people started to care about World Cups. It’s now hosted sevens World Cups, was a founding member of the World Sevens Series and remains the iconic event of the calendar. “The saying goes that, if you get bored, you can turn around and watch the rugby,” laughs Robbie. “And there’s more than an element of truth in that. It’s Hong Kong’s Mardi Gras and people come because they want to let their hair down, and they just want they want to have fun.”
The off-field is arguably more famous than the on-field. “A lot of stuff that we’ve done has been a bit tongue in cheek,” explains Robbie. “There’s always been a lot of humour about the stuff we’ve done, whether it’s been having David Hasselhoff here or kung fu rugby or Sébastien Chabal dressed as a caveman – there’s always been an awful lot of humour. And that’s reflected in the fancy dress ethos too.”
While this year, Robbie is personally excited to be having The Wailers and Arnel Pineda of Journey fame appear live – he’s previously managed to get the Beach Boys here too – he knows the importance of the rugby to the wider game. “We existed before the sevens series and then we were one of the founding tournaments, and we’re proud of the fact we’ve always been on the cutting edge of the sevens game.
“I think we feel that, without Hong Kong and Dubai there wouldn’t have been a World Series, and probably sevens wouldn’t have made it to the Olympics. We feel we’ve played a central role in the development of the sevens game.”
It’s not only Robbie that’s departing this year – albeit he’s only making the transition from the organisers’ box back to the South Stand – it’s also a farewell to the stadium, thirty years after it officially opened.
As of 2025, the sevens is moving to the shiny new 50,000-capacity Kai Tak Sports Park, designed with the tournament specifically in mind – including 24 changing rooms – which will allow the sevens to continue to be at the forefront of the game.
Its loyal fans will undoubtedly approve. “People come back every year,” says Robbie. “It’s like an annual trip to Mecca. There are groups of Fijians who live all over the world and the one place they come back to every year to catch up is Hong Kong. It’s where you get to see your old friends, drink in the same bars, eat in the same restaurants, and that makes for a truly lovely thing – it’s like one giant 40,000-person reunion.”
