alt A DEMONSTRATION rugby tournament may be played at Twickenham before the 2012 Olympics as part of the International Rugby Board's (IRB) latest effort to return the sport to the Games for the first time since 1924, it was reported today.

 

Greg Thomas, the Dublin-based IRB's head of communications, said in an interview published today with news agency Bloomberg that the organisation has appointed the Vero, public relations company founded by Mike Lee, the former media director of London's 2012 Olympic bid, to help get rugby back in the Summer Games.

 

Thomas told Bloomberg: "Mike and his experienced staff will be working to help us fulfill our ambitions, including getting rugby back into the Olympic Games."

 

Full Olympic status for rugby sevens, the short-form of the game, would enable many of the sport's 115 member nations to get greater public funding, while also giving the IRB a share of Olympic broadcast revenue.

 

The earliest that rugby may be included as an Olympic sport would be the 2016 Summer Games.

 

The Host City will be determined at an IOC meeting in Copenhagen next year.

 

A vote also will taken then on what sports, if any, to add to the programme.

 

In 2005, after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) dropped baseball and softball, rugby sevens was one of five sports considered for inclusion in London.

 

Ultimately, the IOC decided not to add any sports for the 2012 roster.

 

Rugby sevens is a variant of rugby union in which only seven players per side feature, instead of the full 15.

 

The sport is very popular and featured in the 2002 and 2006 Commonwealth Games.

 

There was controversy after the vote in Singapore when IOC member Denis Oswald, now the head of the co-ordination commission overseeing London's preparations for 2012, dismissed the sport declaring: “When it comes to rugby, I am not a specialist, but people within the sport tell me that rugby sevens is something of a joke.”

 

Oswald later confirmed that he had never in fact watched a game of sevens, or indeed, fifteens rugby.

 

This year the organisers of cultural events at the Beijing Olympics will stage demonstrations of wushu, a full-contact Chinese martial art.

 

The IRB may take a similar tactic ahead of the London Olympics by staging a rugby tournament at Twickenham, the 82,000-seat home of English rugby.

 

"We will follow Beijing very closely in terms of what we can do,'' Thomas said.

 

The United States is the reigning Olympic champion at rugby after beating France 17-3 before 40,000 spectators at the 1924 Paris Games.