Osea Kolinisau, the coach of the Fiji men’s sevens team, has given the players’ present level of fitness a mere five out of 10. Kolinisau is in a race against time to help the team defend their gold medal at the Olympic Games in sevens this summer in Paris.

Gareth Baber spoke of the importance of getting the athletes in optimal physical condition. He led the team to victory in Tokyo, following their triumph in Rio in 2016. Baber has been brought in to supervise the Olympic preparations, helping Kolinisau, whose upcoming task is the HSBC SVNS leg in Singapore.

Hong Kong marked Kolinisau’s first tournament in charge after Ben Gollings was fired in March. “Maybe we are around five right now in a scale of one to ten, we are not there yet,” he told the Fiji Times this week during training.

“The purpose of this session is to simply pick up where the lads left off and go on from there. It’s fantastic to see the boys all in, but we still have a ways to go. We are still working on our tackle methods and conditioning.

“We believed we had our chances and gave that tournament (Hong Kong) away.” Six mishandles was too many for us.

“We had four straight opportunities to take advantage of our 12-point lead over New Zealand, and I believe that if we had scored a try, we could have ended the game.” The lads will eventually have to learn these lessons the hard way; some can be learned through play, but some must be learned through experience.

The double gold medal winning playmaker, veteran Jerry Tuwai, is participating in training in the hopes of being called upon again.

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