From Rugby to Revival: How Hong Kong Sevens Signals the City’s Post-Pandemic Resurgence
The Hong Kong Sevens returned in a newly built $6bn Kai Tak Sports Park for the first time since the pandemic lockdowns and it has become a symbolic relaunch of the city itself.
The scent of change in Hong Kong hits before the airport doors finish sliding shut behind you. Even now, as the taxi speeds off Lantau Island – home to the city’s international airport since 1998 – there’s a lingering smell of concrete dust in the air. Construction cranes flank the skyline. Traffic glides along freshly minted overpasses. It’s late Friday afternoon and I’m en route to one of Asia’s biggest annual parties: the Hong Kong Sevens. But this time, there’s more than rugby on the line.
For the first time since 1994, the beloved tournament is being held not at the familiar, ageing national stadium in Happy Valley, but across the harbour at the gleaming new Kai Tak Sports Park – a staggering $6bn complex built atop the grounds of the old international airport. More than a sports venue, the 50,000-seat stadium and the sprawling 28ha precinct that surrounds it is a marker of recovery, a signal to the world that the city is moving on from the bruising silence of Covid, and the pro-democracy protests that preceded the pandemic.
For a large part of the 20th century, Kai Tak was infamous among pilots for being one of the most dangerous international airports in the world. Flights arriving over Victoria Harbour had to make a sharp 47-degree turn at a chequerboard-painted marker on a hillside, threading between high-rise buildings to reach a runway that jutted into the bay. Only senior captains were permitted to land planes. Aviation geeks adored it. Travellers held their breath. And surrounding residents simply had to get used to passengers peering into their living rooms as the big planes screamed past their windows.
There’s history under the sports park’s tarmac. Originally constructed in the 1920s as a British military airfield, Kai Tak was later commandeered by Japanese forces during World War II. They extended the runway using forced labour from Allied POWs, including Australians, who dragged massive stone slabs under brutal conditions. War records describe prisoners barely alive from starvation, pockets of lice hanging off their arms.
By the late 1990s, the increase in air traffic and roar of jets above dense urban housing made Kai Tak untenable. So in 1998, just a year after the handover from British to Chinese rule, the airport was relocated to the man-made Chek Lap Kok islet off Lantau Island.
For two decades, the Kai Tak site sat in limbo in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. There was huge pressure to develop it into public housing, with land here among the most expensive on the planet. But the Hong Kong government held its ground and, working with Australian architects Populous, known for stadiums from Melbourne’s Docklands to India’s Ahmedabad, the vision for Kai Tak Sports Park was born.
“We added up what this land would have been worth if it had been sold,” says Paul Henry, Populous senior principal. “It’s north of a billion. But what they’ve built is a long-term legacy.”
The Hong Kong Sevens has always been more than a rugby tournament. It’s a carnival. A social phenomenon. An unofficial reunion of expats, ageing rugby heads and beer enthusiasts. But after pandemic cancellations in 2020 and 2021 and restricted attendance in recent years, the 2025 event was a symbolic relaunch of the city itself.
Over three days, 110,907 fans filed through the new turnstiles, including 30,000 international visitors. In the stands, 1.5 litre jugs of beer for $HK280 ($57) flowed freely (fans drank 140,000 pints), as did cocktails, while the wine-leaning could order Australian chardonnay in 1.5 litre pouches or a bottle of cab sav or sav blanc served, extraordinarily, in a jug.
On the field, Argentina’s gym-buffed young guns won their first Hong Kong title, while New Zealand’s women continued their dominance with a win over Australia. World Rugby chairman Brett Robinson called it “one of the great sevens events on the global calendar”.
But it wasn’t flawless. Food outlets ran dry by quarter-final time on the Sunday, following similar shortages on the opening two days that were highlighted on the front page of the local Sunday Morning Post. And at the debut of a World Snooker Grand Prix event at neighbouring Kai Tak Arena weeks earlier, a midnight curfew led to audience members being asked to leave mid-match due to transportation concerns.
On finals day, even the ghosts of Kai Tak were honoured. A Cathay Pacific A350-1000 performed a low flyover of the stadium, tracing the path pilots once took to land at the old airport. It was a thunderous nod to the city’s aeronautic history.
For some former neighbours of the old airport, the memories are visceral.
“I knew someone who could identify aircraft just by the engine sound,” says walking tour guide Paul Chan. “And another woman who had lived all her life in the flight path told me she missed the noise so much, she would take a bus to the new airport just to hear the planes again.”
Chan grew up beside nearby Kowloon Walled City, now a peaceful park but once the most densely populated – and lawless – urban enclave on Earth. Some 33,000 people were crammed into five football fields of space, with no taxes, no police, no building codes. Triads might have ruled the area but they left residents alone. Families stacked homes atop each other, creating a tangled high-rise maze where sunlight struggled to enter.
“It was called the City of Darkness,” Chan says. “You could walk inside and never see the sky. Buildings went up 10 to 12 storeys. There were secret alleyways and limited water (from wells) and toilets. Rubbish was dumped outside to rot among the rats.
“I met the postman and he said he took three years just to learn the routes.”
Though demolished in the 1990s, the Walled City lives on in documentaries and video games. Like much of Hong Kong, the past has not been erased; it’s been reimagined.
Walk a block or two and you are surrounded by Old Hong Kong. Tak Hing Fish Ball Company makes its yellow eel and Chinese perch gummy staple by hand every day from 5am – surprisingly good with the company’s curry sauce – while Heung Tea House has been roasting leaves behind the shop for 62 years, storing them in canisters a century old. Kwai Yue Woo Kee Loong Chiu Chow Pastry Shop, a bigger mouthful to say than the sweet treats, has pigsheads and lobsters made of peanut candy sitting out front, symbolising good fortune. They’re eaten during fasting periods when killing animals is forbidden. But there’s no escaping the empty shops that reflect the struggle to pay the rent.
Covid hit Hong Kong hard, with longer restrictions than almost anywhere else. But in March 2025, dubbed Super March by tourism officials, the city roared back. There was Art Basel, LIV Golf, world snooker and pop-culture festival ComplexCon, capped off by the Sevens. A record-breaking 3.4 million people visited during the month, including 960,000 non-mainland Chinese travellers. A 12 per cent bump in tourism occupancy brought a renewed sense of purpose.
Hong Kong has always been a city of contradictions, restless yet nostalgic, dense yet deeply personal. And here is Kai Tak Stadium, singing with new ambition and no small amount of pressure. Yes, housing remains a pressing issue; parking downtown can cost $HK40 an hour. Petrol hovers at $HK30 a litre. One taxi driver tells me most locals don’t own cars, not because they can’t afford the vehicles, but because they can’t afford to park them. “Upwards of a fifth of your salary,” he shrugs.
And yet here they are, as the region battles chronic fiscal deficits, lining up for concerts, cheering from the bleachers, buzzing through shopping arcades and food stalls. There’s a spark in the city again.
In the know
Hong Kong Sevens will be held in late March or early April 2026. The exact date will be released later this year. Cathay Pacific will have ticket and flight packages available to book from October.
Garry Ferris was a guest of Cathay Pacific and the Hong Kong Tourism Board.
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