Dear bc readers
As editor, I apologise that our Sevens coverage hasn’t been as comprehensive as in past years. Especially as during the last domestic rugby season bc magazine averaged around three articles per week on local rugby.
The reason is, and I’ll quote the HK Rugby Union’ s PR mandarin Sean Moore “I will continue to omit you from my press release distribution and invitation to rugby union events”. “I believe that my decision is defensible based on the negative spin consistently applied to those efforts”
Negative spin – that means for bc magazine to get press releases and notification of rugby events and media accreditation to matches for our rugby photograher we must write sycophantic “HKRU is wonderful” advertorials.
bc magazine exposed the HKRU’s introduction of ethnic quotas and active racism to local rugby via a new rule announced last September. The rule was quickly amended after bc’s article was published and a defamatory and factually inaccurate cover-up campaign mounted against myself and bc by the HKRU and it’s Chairman Pieter Schats.
It should also be stated here that World Rugby the sports global governing body refused to condemn the HKRU’s introduction of racism to local sport when asked in September to comment on the new rule. So much for rugby’s stated core values of integrity and respect. Perhaps World Rugby could explain how racism ‘builds character’?
The HKRU thinks bc shouldn’t criticise them for scrapping children’s tickets for the general public at this year’s event. Local children who get inspired by watching rugby at the Sevens are the future player pool of the national side, the dream and the desire to represent your country infront of 40,000 screaming fans starts from watching in the stands.
The blatant sexually discriminatory bias of the HKRU’s website where 90% plus of the coverage is about men’s rugby is shameful given the vibrant and surging growth of the game amongst women locally in recent years. As I write this www.hkrugby.com has no mention of day 1 of the HK Women’s Rugby Sevens. The day’s match results are nowhere to be found.
The HKRU’s response to me writing and exposing the truth – throwing it’s toys out of the pram like a spoilt child and blocking my accreditation as a photographer to cover the Sevens and deleting bc magazine from the HKRU’s media mailing list.
Actively introducing racism to local rugby, price gouging children, sexually discriminatory coverage… The HKRU has far deeper and more institutionalised problems than ‘negative spin’.
For the first time in over 20 years I won’t be slaving over a computer screen till 5am finishing articles and editing photos. Hope you enjoy the rugby, I will!
Go Hong Kong!