More than a decade after competing at the Athens Olympics, Janice Josephs is loving her new sport of rugby. She admits she's still learning the basics. "I didn't know about forward passes [when I started]."I didn't know I had to stand behind a player before she can release the ball, so all of those nitty-gritty things I'm learning."Yet Josephs, who quit athletics early last year, still has sufficient raw talent to crack an invitation to train with the national women's sevens team who are in camp in Stellenbosch, preparing for the Atlanta leg of the women's sevens world series.They face the US, Russia and New Zealand in their pool.Josephs, who turns 33 at the end of the month, competed in heptathlon at the 2004 Games before switching to long jump, where she achieved a personal best 6.79m that ranked her 21st in the world in 2007.Her fastest 100m was 11.36sec in Pretoria in 2005, and she's quickly getting up to speed again.Sprinting years best"I have come into this camp unfit because I haven't been training properly in a long time."It's starting to pick up ... in athletics we build our speed up but what the coaches want from me here is to zip out of the blocks."So what [coach] Renfred [Dazel] is doing with me is when I get the ball I must zip. That is what I'm working on now."Josephs said some people told her they were disappointed when she gave up track and field "because they said these were my best years as a sprinter"."We are building up my speed here. We are trying to wake the old Janice up again. I'm getting faster; I'm loving it."I can see my eyes have got that fire again if I look at the mirror in the morning. That means I'm training," she said, admitting it was a lot tougher than the training she was used to at her Pniel Villagers rugby club."It's probably a lazy warm-up, girls want to do their thing."No fearBut on the field Josephs gives her all, unfazed by the physicality of the game."I'm not scared of tackling, I'm not scared to lose my teeth," said Josephs, recalling a match in which she was the sole defender chasing an opponent with the scores locked at 20-20 and time almost gone."I ran behind her and I actually pulled her pants down," she said with a laugh.Josephs is proud to be on the comeback trail of life, having been forced to live in a shelter for the homeless for a while last year."In 2015 I'm in a good place; I don't want to talk about the negatives."She's working in an embroidery shop in Paarl, but points out that her lack of education has been a stumbling block to finding employment."My grade 10 certificate is holding me back. I wanted to be in the police force, I wanted to be in uniform."Perhaps one day she will get to wear the national women's rugby uniform...