Fiji rugby mourns Challenor
Former Fiji Rugby Union Board member and interim chief executive officer Bob Challenor has died in a Sydney hospital after a long illness aged 64.
“Bob was someone who gave to Fiji rugby 100% of what he could give,” said FRU chief executive Pio Bosco Tikoisuva, who took over Challenor’s position when the rugby body went professional in January 2002.
“He was always passionate in his beliefs and he was a great fighter of what he saw to be the injustices within the world rugby order that impacted Fiji and Pacific Island rugby.
“His unswerving commitment to the FRU in particular, and to Fiji rugby in general, during some of the darkest days of our administration was what ensured the game could survive today.”
Challenor was the chief executive of the FRU’s national team board in 2000 when Fiji rugby was hit by a series of sporting bans and “Smart” sanctions levelled by Australia and New Zealand in the wake of the May 2000 political crisis.
The same attempted coup had decimated the FRU’s finances, and the commercial and insurance concerns of the organisers of the 2000 Pacific Rim Championships forced the Vodafone Fiji 15s team to play its “home” matches in neighbouring Samoa.
“One can say quite categorically that if Bob had not been in charge during that wretched period of so-called smart sanctions, Fiji rugby would have collapsed,” Tikoisuva added.
But the impact of the sanctions and the near-collapse of the local economy drove the FRU’s debt close to one million Fiji dollars.
Challenor was then instrumental in commissioning an independent review into the governance and administration of Fiji rugby that produced the July 2001 publication ’The Taskforce Report on the Future of Fiji Rugby’.
When the recommendations of the report were unanimously accepted, he was elected in November 2001 by provincial Union delegates to serve on the first nine-person Board of the restructured FRU and served until April this year.
His love of Fiji rugby stemmed from his boyhood memories of Fiji touring Australia in the early 1950s.
He later built up a strong relationship with the FRU while based in Sydney, and helped organise a reunion of the 1954 Fiji team and later the Fiji match against the Australian Barbarians prior to the 1999 World Cup.
He also worked for many years on Mana Island in the Mamanucas, coaching the local team to success, particularly the Mana Magicians 10s team to Hong Kong.
After three years working with the FRU in Suva, he returned to Australia late last year for medical reasons.
Challenor is survived by his three sons Simon, Jacob and Joshua.
