Rugby union has been a men's medal sport at the modern Summer Olympic Games, being played at four of the first seven competitions.

In October 2009 the IOC voted at its session in Copenhagen to include the sevens version of the sport in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Three National Olympic Committees (NOCs), France, Germany and Great Britain, entered teams at the 1900 games.

Like the 1900 Games, three teams entered: Australasia (representing Australia and New Zealand), France, and hosts Great Britain (which included the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), but France pulled out prior to the commencement of the tournament, due to being unable to field a representative team.

[11] The sport also failed to appear on the provisional schedule of the 1916 Summer Olympics, which were cancelled due to World War I.

A campaign to send an American side to the 1920 games in Antwerp started in California after a Berkeley rugby union touring party returned from British Columbia undefeated in 1920.

French fans also threw bottles and rocks onto the field and at American players and officials, wild brawls broke out in the stands, and U.S. spectator Gideon Nelson was knocked unconscious after being hit in the face by a walking stick.

At the medal ceremony, The Star-Spangled Banner was drowned out by the booing and hissing of French fans, and the American team had to be escorted to their locker room under police protection.

The crowd violence during, and the pitch invasion after, the 1924 Olympic Final served to give rugby a poor image.

This, combined with the problems of attracting sufficient teams to make it a viable competition, the desire 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.

[3][16][24] 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.

[25][26] A significant step in the process of acceptance back into the Olympic Movement was achieved at a ceremony held in Cardiff in November 1994, when the IRB was officially confirmed as a Recognised International Federation of the IOC.