Project Hooper: Inside the plans (and problems) of turning a Wallaby into an Olympian

As the Australian sevens team returned to training in early January, the sight of Michael Hooper on the sidelines in a boot, nursing an Achilles tendon niggle, might have elicited a smirk from the doubters.

After just a few months of training to turn the former Wallabies captain into a sevens player, here was evidence of the difficulty of the task: trying to re-build a 32-year-old body into an athlete who can not only compete in the rocket-fuelled world of Olympic sevens, but simply get on the field in the first place.

But if there were concerns Hooper’s Achilles tendon injury is the portent of problems to come – and may end up hurting his chances of playing at the Olympics in July – they aren’t shared by the man tasked with his athletic renovation.

“It is nothing major – we got a little bit of a kickback but that always happens, and I probably thought it was going to happen earlier in the piece to be honest,” Mick Stephen, the head of athletic performance for the Australian men’s sevens team, said.

The Achilles injury was enough to rule Hooper out of a debut at the Perth sevens, and delay his first run in the short-form game until the Los Angeles sevens in March, or possibly even Hong Kong in April.

That would still see Hooper playing four or five tournaments before the Olympic Games in July, and with the end goal being Hooper fit and firing in an Australian jersey in Paris, coach John Manenti is more than happy to err on the side of caution when re-drafting the plan for “Project Hooper”.

Former Wallabies captain Michael Hooper is trying his hand at sevens.

“I’d have loved six (tournaments) but I will take two,” Manenti said.

The irony is not lost on Manenti that the reason he recruited Hooper is behind the injury flare up, in a buy-the-bull, get-the-horns way. Ahead of his official start with the team on January 1, Stephen mapped out a three-month plan to slowly build up the high-speed athletic capacity of Hooper, which is non-negotiable in sevens.

But the inner-competitor of 125-Test flanker, likely fuelled by a controversial Rugby World Cup snub, reared its head. With Stephen and the Australian team away in Dubai and Cape Town, Hooper flirted with the red zone when training on his own on Manly back-ovals at Christmas.

“I was getting really fit and wanted to bring more on, ‘let’s try and play as minutes as possible in Perth’, and I was doing that by myself. It is getting the balance right,” Hooper said.

Michael Hooper was controversially left out of the Wallabies’ squad for last year’s Rugby World Cup.

“A bit of restraint would have been good, now in hindsight. But where my head got to was, ‘Perth is around the corner’. This game is different, if I can get as much time on the field that’s going to make me the best player I can be. I don’t want to just be a cog in the wheel for this team, I want to contribute. So now we have seen aerobically I can get there, I just need to fix up some of the strength bits to match it.”

While experience and mental toughness aren’t a problem, the challenge for Hooper in turning into a sevens player was always going to be – as a 30-something athlete – adapting to the unique physical demands of sevens, and the training required to avoid breaking down. Sevens players have to be extremely fit and fast, and be able to get up for six games over a three-day tournament.

“We mapped out where we needed to get him to, and reverse engineered from that,” Stephen said.

“We had a 12-week plan, each week we had targets and goals around base running. So for example: distance, high speed, very high speed, sprint efforts, acceleration efforts. The difference between that stuff and his 15s loads is significant. In a (15s) training week he would be doing a couple of hundred high-speed metres, maybe. And same deal in a game, he may do 500-700 metres. But for us, in a session he could be doing 1000 high-speed metres and in a week he could be doing 3000-4000m. It was just about bridging that gap.”

Starting with training every second day, and then daily and then multiple sessions in a day, Hooper ate up the work.

“He came and joined us for a few sessions and he handled it with ease,” Stephen said.

“Hoops is a competitor. I would send him through what we are doing, why we are doing it, what a four-day training week looks like, you’ll be sitting at 90 per cent of what the boys are doing. But I know in the back of his mind he is thinking, ‘I have to be a competitor, I want to be where they’re at and push’.”

Manenti’s plan has always been to use Hooper as a role player from the bench, to “create chaos” for three to four-minute impact stints.

Australia coach John Manenti at training in Perth.

“But I probably got a bit carried away and started getting really fit and thought ‘OK, maybe I can punch out a bit more minutes in Perth’ and now we have peeled it back to where we started,” Hooper said. “And maybe that is the type of player I can have the best impact for this team.”

Hooper, who is in Perth dividing his time between soaking up the rhythms of the team at a tournament and commentating with Stan, is not concerned about the injury setback. Like Manenti, his eyes are firmly on the Paris prize.

“I want to be the best player I can be for this team. I am itching to play, but I want to play when I am fit,” Hooper said.

Former Wallaby Stephen Hoiles, who was an assistant coach of the men’s sevens team in 2018-20, dismisses the doubts of those who believe Hooper won’t make Paris.

Aussie sevens star Maurice Longbottom at training in Perth this week.

“I am not one of those who think it is mission impossible,” Hoiles said.

“Fifteens is a tough game but you get plenty of downtime. Sevens is like Olympic rowers jumping in a boat and knowing the only way to succeed is going in the hurt locker from start to finish, and just hanging on. It’s very different from a mentality point of view.

“You have to be able to take yourself to a dark spot and stay there for a weekend. That’s the challenge. The chat about sevens being a young man’s game is 20 years old. What they’re able to do with ageing athletes is incredible these days. So it’s an old man’s game as much as anything because you need to be mentally tough. And they don’t come much tougher than Hoops.”

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