Chelsea and Alana Bremner, two of the most important players in the Black Ferns forward pack, were there the moment rugby changed forever. They tell Greg Bruce what it meant.

It was, by some distance,
the most important moment in New Zealand rugby history when, on the evening of October 8, 2022, the Black Ferns ran out onto a sold-out Eden Park for the opening game of that year’s Rugby World Cup.

The ground was sold out, making it the biggest crowd for any game of women’s sport in the country’s history, there were thousands of families and kids, the atmosphere was ferociously positive, the goodwill through the roof. When the players ran onto the ground in front of Eden Park’s north stand and turned to the crowd, you could see the power and importance of the occasion in their faces. They were overwhelmed by it.

Some of this was about how far things had come. The women’s game had, until not long before, been ghettoised, even at the elite level. In 2019, rugby commentator Scotty Stevenson reported on the Super Series tournament then being staged in San Diego, involving the top five teams in the world, including the Black Ferns, who were then reigning world champions.

He wrote: “The playing field in San Diego? It’s been described as barely fit for a training run. And it’s a training field… The changing sheds? A tent with a portable toilet. I can’t actually retype that. I am shaking my head too much… The grandstand? Nope. Fans are asked to bring their own seats. BRING THEIR OWN SEATS!… Chase a ball out of play? Nope. Rattlesnakes might get ya. RATTLE F****** SNAKES!

For that team to be running out, three years later, in front of tens of thousands of fans at the most important ground in world rugby? It transcended sport and spoke not just to the potential for social change, but the fact it can happen in a moment.

For those at the ground, or even those watching on television, it was clear that something big was happening. The feeling around the ground was love, pure and simple, and its object was not just the players on the field but all the players that had come before and those that would come after, who were, at that precise moment, being inspired by what they were seeing and feeling, and the change it represented. To feel that love from the grandstand was deeply moving. To have felt it as part of the team must have been something else again. To have been able to share that feeling with your sister? Only two people in the country have any idea what that was like.

Alana is, by two years, the younger of the Bremner sisters but started playing rugby first, aged 7. Chelsea didn’t play her first game until she was 21, and only then because Alana’s Lincoln University team was short of numbers. Her knowledge of the rules was so poor that when she was yellow-carded for not using her arms in a tackle, she had neither any idea what had happened nor any idea it was happening to her. But she wasn’t humiliated or shamed, as you might reasonably expect to happen to a clueless 21-year-old man bumbling around getting yellow cards he doesn’t know about.

“That’s just the beauty of women’s rugby,” she says. “It’s so great. There’s so many women learning and it’s such an inclusive environment. Everyone’s welcome.”

Four years after her first game of rugby, Chelsea made her Black Ferns debut. Alana’s first test came the following year. By the time of the opening game of the World Cup in 2022, they were two of the first names on the team sheet.

“I wasn’t actually playing in the opening game,” Alana says. “I was coming back from my injury, but that first haka – it was honestly magical.”

The game of rugby that followed was excellent, but it was only a game of rugby.

“I think every single person at that game was there to lift up women’s rugby,” Chelsea says. “I don’t think we felt the pressure. Well, I personally didn’t feel pressure from the crowd to perform, because I knew that they were all just there to support us and support women’s rugby. They weren’t there to critique us, they were just there for the love of the game.”

Has any All Black ever said or even thought anything remotely along these lines? Has any New Zealander gone to an All Blacks game to “lift up” the players or “just for the love of the game”? If someone goes to an All Blacks game and doesn’t have some sort of critique, can that person even be said to be a New Zealander?

Full professionalism for the women’s game only arrived in this country at the beginning of 2022. It meant the players could finally focus on being fulltime athletes, which not only led to them being stronger, faster, fitter and more competitive against the two best teams in the world, England and France (countries that had introduced professionalism in 2019 and thrashed the Black Ferns in 2021), but also changed the way they lived. The Bremners believe they are probably the last generation of women players that will have established careers outside rugby before they turn pro.

With professionalism comes commitments to sponsors, and the reason for this interview is that the Bremners are currently working as ambassadors for the nationwide phenomenon that is the Sanitarium Weet-Bix Kids TRYathlon. Since its beginnings in 1992, three years before Chelsea was born, nearly half a million Kiwi kids have swum, biked and run their way through the event, making it almost a rite of passage in this country. The Bremners – who had an active upbringing and were often out running, biking and playing sport – each took part five times.

They were country kids and remember going to Christchurch’s QE2 Park for the event as daunting. “But as soon as you get into it, it’s amazing, and it’s all worth it,” Alana says. “And I think if you can get a friend or a sibling along to do it with, it makes it even easier.”

Sanitarium have been big supporters of the Black Ferns in the last couple of years, following a difficult moment in 2022 when 6-year-old Christchurch girl Daisy Dawson wrote to ask why the company’s popular Weet-Bix collectible rugby cards featured the All Blacks but not the Black Ferns. Initially brushed off by the company, Daisy teamed up with Fair Go and suddenly the Black Ferns were in pantries all over the country.

The impact of Daisy’s intervention should not be underestimated. Chelsea says the cards have made a big difference to the way the players are perceived. “We’ve heard from so many people who have got children in primary schools that there’s lots of training going on and our names are thrown around a lot with young people.”

When the Black Ferns beat England in front of another sold-out Eden Park crowd, in the final of that momentous World Cup in 2022, in the most gut-wrenching finish imaginable, the result was enormous for both players and supporters.

But the feeling was far bigger than just the euphoria that comes with being able to say your team is the best in the world.

Chelsea says: “To have these memories with Alana and the memories with all the girls that I’d played rugby with, those will be the things that I remember instead of the scores.”

Elite athletes who have just reached the top of their sport are famous for following it up with the phrase, “It hasn’t sunk in yet.” Not the Black Ferns, though, and definitely not the Bremners. Chelsea says: “I think most of us stayed on cloud nine for the next few months.”

There are many possible reasons it meant so much to them, but this is the one I choose to believe: Winning a game, even a very important one, doesn’t feel as great as you think it will; changing the world feels better.

The Sanitarium Weet-Bix Kids Tryathlons continue around the country until March 27. To find your nearest location, go to tryathlon.co.nz