Sport: Fiji's Olympic 7s success remembered one year on

Transcript

BEN RYAN: These days on social media you get your Facebook where you wake up and suddenly get a memory that Facebook wants to share with you from a year ago and I've been getting those regularly of videos of me getting on the plan to the training camp in Chile and various other ones. In many ways it feels like a lifetime ago but at the same time that last 12 months has flown by. Everything has changed for me, at a personal and professional level, and that team has almost been dismantled so there's been a lot of change, both with the Fiji team and with me. Some days it feels like it was yesterday and others it feels like it was somebody else that took them to Rio.

VINNIE WYLIE: With a year to reflect on that, which was the culmination of a three year goal of your time with Fiji rugby. That was the objective...you can have all the talent in the world - and you guys certainly didn't have all the resources in the world - but to actually get over the line and achieve that goal is never easy?

BR: No it isn't and I think we obviously knew it was a stretch-goal but, like you said, we had the talent and I was very grateful to the Prime Minister in those last 18 months, where he just made sure that everybody else stayed out of my business I suppose and let me get on with things. When you're getting results then everyone's happy so it was and the book is out in May and there's lot of stories that people won't have read or know about that we'll talk about. It was an incredible journey and one I'm pretty grateful that I was part of.

VW: Roughly four years ago now that you took charge of the Fiji team - could you ever imagine three or four years down the line you'd have the World Series titles, the Olympic gold medal yourself and Oscar (Kolinisau, the captain) and the team won but both of you would make it onto coins and notes in Fiji of course?

BR: [Laughs] Fijians and islanders I think once you gain their love and you are loyal to them they show you huge amounts of love back and things like being given a chief (title) and notes and coins I suppose are testament to that. All the trouble we had in the first six months and everything that I had in that first couple of weeks you still saw the talent and you still saw the opportunity and I think even in those first few days that's probably what kept me on the island. I could see we were going to assemble a team that was going to win world titles and could win an Olympic medal. We just had to get all our ducks in a row, so to speak.