Justin Bieber seriously injured while not playing Beach Rugby

December 11-12, 2010

Sometimes in life, hard work goes unnoticed and worse, unappreciated. This weekend, that was
not the case.

We left around 11pm-ish Friday night to head to Manta for the Beach Rugby Tournament. Half of the bus belonged to us and the other half belonged to the other Cuenca rugby team. Like always, I slept for most of the ride.

Around 7 am at our hostel with a beach front view! Awesome! The weather was a little overcast and the heat of the day had not yet arrived.

While everyone got settled in I went in search of some fruit for snacks in between games. Like most things here, it turned into an adventure.. One of the Christians on the team joined me for the walk. The streets were pretty empty of cars and traffic which is not too strange for a Saturday morning. We followed the directions of walking 6 blocks and turning left away from the beach. When we did so, I found were all the people in Manta were.
The streets were lined with tent and other type of temporary store fronts selling everything. The scene reminded me a lot of the Italian market in Philadelphia but with wayyyyyy more people and cars and bicycle venders. Of course not expecting to find this treasure I did not have my camera. Within seconds we found a banana vender and then a orange vender. The orange vender tried to give us his worst oranges but we were having none of that and made him empty the bag he had filled and start over. In total I was nearly run over 6 times and most near misses were from bicyclists.

Around 10 am we all piled back into the bus to head to Tarqui beach where the tournament was being held.

The brackets were decided and one of the teams in our bracket was the Quito team that won the 7’s tournament this past weekend. It was not going to be an easy road if we were to win.
The first game we played was a bit lopsided in our favor. The next two games were barely won, by a margin of 4 points in one game and against the Quito team we won by 2.
We were all ecstatic to make it to the finals which happen the next day!




Before heading back to the hostal for some much needed food, we all went for a swim in the ocean. The water was a perfect temperature and there were some good waves. We even got to see some surfers in action.

My night was spent hanging out with some other PCVs who were in town for the weekend. We ate seafood at a beach shack and later sipped some beers on the beach.
Sunday…
The team was all warmed up and ready to go. Their energy and focus was clear, they had to win.

The Nomads are a much taller team, each one of their players had a good few inches on the players on my team. They also have a few foreigners on their team (French, English and American) who grew up with rugby.

The Nomads were the first score but they missed point after. Shortly after the Aguila’s answered back and made the extra points. 7-5
Late in the last half with the score tied 12-12 one of my players was sent to the sin bin for “being too rough” for two minutes with only a minute left. This was not good. The

Aguilas were visibly tired but needed to hang on for just another minute.
Sure enough they held out! There was some confusion on how to play out the game out. Most people wanted to do overtime/sudden death. However, the rule book states that each player on each team (only using the players that were last on the field) will have the opportunity to kick an extra point. The team who makes more of these kicks wins. Basically a hockey style shoot out. This was a surprise to everyone. But I had confidence because our best kickers were out on the field. But it was going to be tough due to the rather fast crossing wind.

The Nomads were up first and their kick was off. Christian V, was up for the Aguilas and his kick was good. The Nomads answered back with a good kick. Our next kicker missed and so did the Nomads’. Then Juan barely squeezed one through the uprights making it 2-1. The Nomads’ next kicker made it, shit, 2-2. It all came down to our last kicker Christian C. If he made this, the Aguilas would be champions. If he missed it, well, no one was really sure what would happen.

He lined up for the kick and struck the ball well sending the sand under the ball in the air. End of end the ball split the uprights. I could not believe. Christian fell to his knees and the Aguilas rushed to join him in celebration! Camera men were everywhere snapping shots, this was the moment the Aguilas had been training so hard for and it was finally here.

As each one of them received their gold Ecuadorian Olympic medal, I could see the pride in each one of their eyes.




These days, I will never forget.