PACIFIC – Residents of the Pacific islands aren’t used to seeing their compatriots win Olympic medals.

Between them, the nations from within the “Polynesian triangle” –a zone cornered by New Zealand, Easter Island and Hawaii, which contains the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Tonga, Samoa and Niue–have won just a single silver, claimed by super-heavyweight Tongan boxer Paea Wolfgramm in 1996.

However, that claim stands to be corrected with news that Samoan weightlifter Ele Epeloge will soon receive a belated silver medal from the Beijing Games of 2008 after the silver and bronze medallists from her over-75kg have been found to have taken performance enhancing drugs.

Until last week in Rio, no athlete from Micronesia or Melanesia – regions that count among their members Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, Nauru, Palau and Kiribati – had ever stood on an Olympic podium.

That streak ended on August 11, when Fiji thrashed Great Britain in the final of the men’s rugby sevens 43-7, running in an astonishing seven tries on their way to claiming gold.

That the Pacific islands should have enjoyed so little glory in the Olympics is hardly a shock.

The nations are small – only Papua New Guinea has more than a million inhabitants – and poor. The most prosperous, Palau and Nauru, have a GDP per capita of around $15,000, roughly the global average. The next richest state, Fiji, has an output of just $9000 per head.

Yet Fiji’s triumph on the rugby pitch was more likely than it first appears.

The Rio games is the first to include the sport in the schedule for nearly a century. Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics, was himself a rugby referee.

But the event was discontinued after 1924, since matches of 80 minutes were ill-suited to competitions featuring multiple teams in a short period of time.

That isn’t a problem with the seven-a-side version, which is played on a full-sized pitch for halves of between seven and ten minutes, an ideal setup for three-day tournaments.

The Fijians are heavyweights in this format.

Both bookmakers and Rugby Vision, a forecasting model, rated them as favourites going into the competition.

With good reason – they have won the last two World Rugby Sevens Series, and are second only to New Zealand in the all-time standings.

In the fifteen-a-side game, the Fijians are less dominant, since their unpredictable, free-flowing style is often stifled by the organised units of larger nations, which tend to prevail on a more congested pitch.

But along with Samoa and Tonga, Fiji have a proud history in the full version of the game, with famous victories against major European teams in the World Cup.

They often rate in the top ten sides in Rugby Vision’s global rankings.

The reasons for these nations’ strength in this particular sport aren’t immediately obvious.

All three are part of the Commonwealth, and owe much of their sporting heritage to British colonialism.

But that hasn’t made them any good at Britain’s favourite game – the Fijian football side conceded 23 goals in their three matches in Rio, leaking ten to the Germans.

Unlike rugby’s other southern-hemisphere contenders – New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Argentina –the Pacific islands don’t have large populations of European immigrants, for whom the game has typically become part of their expatriate identity.

And crucially, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga have been excluded from elite annual international competitions like the Rugby Championship, for southern hemisphere teams, and the Six Nations, in Europe.

In spite of these obstacles, rugby in the Pacific has three things going for it.

The first is enthusiasm.

The CIA World Factbook suggests that there are approximately 180,000 Fijian men between the ages of 14 and 40 – and somehow the country has around 155,000 players, according to World Rugby, the sport’s governing body.

Members of its Olympic side grew up using plastic bottles as makeshift balls, and such improvisation is in keeping with the roots of Polynesian rugby.

The game was introduced by Europeans – Fiji’s earliest teams were the civil service and the police force. But it soon became the property of “native teams”, who played in bare feet, occasionally on pitches marked by coconuts.

The second bonus that these countries have is cohesion.

Rugby is a unifying force in the Pacific, a region that is often divided – a Fijian coup in 2006, the fourth in two decades, was allegedly postponed until the day after a big domestic game.

Within squads, the Fijian, Samoan and Tongan players do more than simply train together. They perform ancestral warrior dances together, pray together, and in the case of the Olympic champions, sing hymns in harmony together.

Attributing success to “team spirit” might sound trite, but in the world of sevens consistent selection is a rarity – Britain’s Olympic squad had only trained together for a handful of weeks before arriving in Rio.

The distinctive Pacific brand of rugby – with outrageous swerving and speculative offloads, resembling basketball—requires an intimate knowledge of one’s teammates.

The blind passes and supporting runs that allowed the Fijians to cut the British to shreds in Rio are only possible for a side that has performed them together repetitively.

These are the hallmarks of vaka viti – “the Fijian way”.

The third advantage held by rugby players from the Pacific is their physique.

A scientific paper from 2013 presents evidence that “Polynesians are predisposed to possess physical characteristics potentially beneficial to rugby union performance”.

They are heavier, have more muscular limbs and smaller proportions of body fat, and can produce “greater force in explosive movements” than players of other ethnicities.

This combination of impact and agility has also been useful in other sports.

A number of Tongans and Samoans have played in the National Football League, including Super Bowl winners Troy Polamalu and Haloti Ngata.

One of the world’s most famous wrestlers, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, has a Samoan mother.

But this strength has also been Pacific rugby’s greatest weakness.

The power of Polynesian players makes them attractive to wealthier nations – most of the best play for other countries.

Some, like the gigantic winger Jonah Lomu, grow up in New Zealand or Australia.

Many move abroad and qualify through residency, including the Vunipola brothers, who play for England, and their cousin Taulupe Faletau, for Wales.

Indeed, a full squad of players with Pacific heritage could have been quickly assembled from the Olympic sevens teams of France, Japan, America, Australia and New Zealand. And such a team of Pacific allstars probably would have given the Fijians a better match than the British did. - The Economist