to include more individual and women's events, and the departure of a major advocate when Baron Pierre De Coubertin stepped down as head of the Olympic Movement in 1925, marked the downfall of rugby at the Olympics. In 1928, the IOC turned down a request to stage rugby at the Amsterdam Games. An exhibition tournament was held at the 1936 Berlin Games, with France, Germany, Italy and Romania competing. In what is the last rugby union match played at the Olympics as of 2021, France beat Germany in the final 19 to 14. In 1976, 22 African countries and Guyana demanded that New Zealand be banned from the Olympics in Montreal due to a New Zealand rugby team touring South Africa, which had been banned from the Olympics since 1964 because of its apartheid politics. As rugby union was no longer an Olympic sport, the IOC declined to ban New Zealand, and these 23 nations boycotted the 1976 Olympics. Efforts for re-inclusion Fifteens Italy in 1960, the Soviet Union in 1980, and South Korea in 1988 made requests to have rugby union brought back. The 1980 request did not pass, and the 1988 games came close but failed to see the sport's admission, which was backed by the International Rugby Football Board (now, World Rugby (WR)). Apart from supporting the individual host cities' requests, the IRB did not focus its own efforts on returning the sport to the Olympics until the early 1990s, when efforts began to reunite the two movements with a series of informal meetings between the then IRB Secretary, Keith Rowlands, and the British Olympic Association Secretary, Dick Palmer. In 1994, when Vernon Pugh QC of Wales was elected Chairman of the IRB, the march towards Olympic recognition began in earnest. Pugh convinced the IRB Council that Olympic membership – initially as a non-participation sport – would be beneficial to rugby and offer the IRB member unions membership of their National Olympic Committees. Many European Federations, such as France, Italy and Romania, had been members of their National Olympic Committees for decades. The demand to get rugby back in the Olympics mounted as more rugby nations from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas joined the IRB, because it was a sport seen as providing a realistic medal opportunity for a number of smaller nations. A significant step in the process of acceptance back into the Olympic Movement