Rugby union in Georgia
| Rugby union in Georgia | |
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| Country | Georgia |
| Governing body | Georgia Rugby Union |
| National team | Georgia |
| Nickname(s) | Lelos |
| First played | 1928 |
| Registered players | 11,133 |
| Clubs | 68 |
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National competitions
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Rugby union in Georgia is a popular team sport. Rugby union is considered the second most popular sport in Georgia, after association football.
The governing body for rugby union in Georgia is the Georgia Rugby Union. It was founded in 1961 (as a domestic body) and became an official affiliate to the International Rugby Board (IRB) in 1992.
Like some other rugby playing nations, the popularity of the game in Georgia can be traced back to a pre-existing Georgian folk sport, called lelo or Lelo Burti (meaning literally in Georgian "Field Ball"), which is a full contact ball game, and very similar to rugby. In fact, even within Georgian rugby terminology, the word lelo is used to mean a try.
Lelo was played in Georgia from ancient times and is still played on occasions in rural areas. A field ("Lelo") was selected between two river creeks which represented a playing ground. Two teams, usually consisting of the male population of neighboring villages, would face each other, with the local priest acting as the referee. The number of players from each side was not set, but included any able men each village could summon. A large, heavy ball was placed in the middle of the field and the goal of the game was to carry it over the river creek of the opposing side.
During the Soviet period, the Georgians regularly had six or seven players in the USSR side, before the break-up, as well as supplying the Soviet club champion, Dinamo Tbilisi. Rugby has been played in Georgia since the 1930s, possibly earlier, but its first official test was against a touring Zimbabwe side.
There were several unsuccessful attempts to introduce rugby into Georgia, the earliest known being in 1928, with subsequent attempts also in 1940 and in 1948. Rugby was introduced to Georgia by Jacques Haspekian, an Armenian man from Marseilles in France who taught the game to students in the late 1950s through to the mid-1960s, although he then subsequently returned in France. He is still alive and living in Marseilles, he was interviewed on French radio on the occasion of Georgia playing France in the 2007 Rugby World Cup. The very first rugby session was held on October 15, 1959 in Tbilisi, at the racecourse, where 20 people attended the meeting. The first Georgian club formed was the GPI (Georgian Polytechnical Institute), now known as "Qochebi".
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Wikipedia