Circumventing Apartheid: Racial Politics and the Issue of South Africa's Olympic Participation at the 1984 Los Angeles Games

Behind the shadows of an Olympiad replete with tales of Cold War acrimony and lavish commercial excess, emerges South Africa's bureaucratic attempt to achieve readmission to the Olympic Movement prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Games. In the backdrop of the Reagan administration's conciliatory policy of ‘constructive engagement’ towards Pretoria, the all-white South African National Olympic Committee aspired to cease its two-decade-long sporting isolation in the southern California metropolis. Drawing upon archival materials from the International Olympic Studies Center and public debates in the leading national and sporting newspapers and periodicals of the time, this paper will detail and analyse how International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch was forced to navigate a tight political tightrope over the South African issue. Any concession towards Pretoria would have likely agitated the African-bloc nations – a powerful constituency on the IOC with a proclivity for boycotting Olympic Games – as well as the global-nexus of anti-apartheid groups that vehemently opposed South Africa's participation in Los Angeles.