Fiji sent precisely zero athletes to the Winter Olympics in Torino. Skeleton, ice dancing, curling, the nordic combined: these pleasures are lost here. No, the eyes of the Fijian sporting world this weekend were fixed squarely on Los Angeles for Sevens Rugby, a butt-kicking hothouse and the national sport and obsession of Fiji. This year, this is their year, the hope goes, the year the Flying Fijians finally knock off the New Zealand All-Blacks as the big dog on the block. They swept the first two tournaments of the year and a win this weekend would put them out of reach. Everyone else would be playing for second.

Regular rugby involves 14 players on each team and a relatively long, hard-fought game. Sevens is a pressure-cooker variation, seven players to a side and two frantic, insane, seven-minute halves. Normal rugby is a bloody, muddy slog. Sevens is a high-stepping track meet with body slams. The tournament this weekend, the USA Sevens, is as accelerated as the game itself, a 16-team round robin and full elimination playoffs played in just two days, with barely enough time between matches for the players, or fans, to catch their breath.

The Fijian team is a sight--a troop of giant, barrel-chested sprinters who knock people flat like pro-wrestlers one second and fly the length of the field the next. Their Jordan, Gretzky, Pele and Pepsi pitch-man is player-coach Waisele Serevi, playing perhaps in his final season, the twilight days of a legend perhaps at long last leading his gang to the promised land.

The body's not even cold yet and his reincarnation has been crowned: William Ryder, a fleet hot dog who whips the Pacific-heavy crowd in LA into a stiff froth every time he touches the ball. With good reason, too--he crackles! Zero-to-sixty in a stutter-step. Yesterday, I saw him go the distance for a score, juking and feinting like a gazelle, moving as though he was in slow-motion one second and exploding into a blur the next, leaving a wake of tumbling Uruguayans with sprained ankles. And today, in the semifinals against New Zealand, he touched the ball twice and scored twice, including the game-winning try in overtime. When he hit fifth gear running down the sidelines, my jaw dropped and I had to stifle a little giggle. Holy shit.

So all was going well after the Fijians put the All-Blacks in their unfamiliar new place, but then they ran into a snag, a gang of stout limeys playing absolutely out of their minds. Jolly old England! Former colonial rulers! Tally-bloody-ho! Going into the second day, the English side has struggled a bit, ekeing out wins over France and Argentina. Then, in the semis, they played the South Africans, another one of the world's best, and just destroyed them, embarrassed them, denied them the ball and then shoved it back down their throats. As the match flew by, it was like watching the English side inflate with muscles, by the end they were raging, spitting, veined monsters with legs like tree trunks.

Fiji was still pretty confident going into the final, a righteously earned swagger, but nobody told the other blokes, who must have popped another screw, because they unloaded on Fiji's pride like a tank battalion. They opened a cut over captain Daunivucu's eye in the first minute, they made a Ryder-shaped hole in the ground every time he even sniffed the ball and they put Serevi first on his heels and then on his ass. Final score: 38-5.

School stopped so kids could yell at screens, I could hear a collective groan from outside my hotel room each time England scored or Ryder ate turf. The English took the wind out of this country today a little bit. However--there are silver linings in this sport--the Fijians, I think, are still in the driver's seat for the Sevens overall title this year, a title only New Zealand has ever won. But they have to get the swagger back. Next up is the Commonwealth Games and, I think the Fijians hope, a return date with their pasty nemesis.

Incidentally, losers in the tournament are fed into lower and lower brackets, but there is a prize at the end of even the losers' brackets. The winner of the lowest bracket, composed of the worst four teams in the tournament--the US, Mexico, Kenya and the West Indes--wins the shield, and so it goes like a place-setting, next bracket gets the bowl, then the plate and finally England's bitter-filled cup. The US team managed just one win in the tournament, over the exhausted, battered Mexicans (who lost their first-round matches by a combined 218-7, in just 42 total minutes), and then lost in the shield bracket final to an infectiously joyous Kenyan side.