Runners Seek Passports

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30482, 2 July 1964, Page 13

Runners Seek Passports

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) JOHANNESBURG, July 1. Two black South African athletes made urgent application yesterday for passports to enable them to run in Britain. Both men, Humphrey Khosi and Benoni Malaka, hold the South African all-comers record of 1:48.7 for the halfmile, within the Olympic qualifying standard. They were to have been in a multi-racial team of South African athletes to tour Europe and Britain later this year. The tour was cancelled, it is understood, because the Minister of the Interior, Mr

Jan de Klerk, refused them passports. The tour’s cancellation by the South African Amateur Athletic Union followed a decision of the International Olympic Committee to demand an anti-apartheid statement from the South African Olympic Committee before South Africans were admitted to Olympic Games. Participation in international or world sport tournaments by mixed teams representative of South Africa as a whole could in no circumstances be approved, the Minister said.

Malaka and Khosi have applied through the Bantu Amateur Sport and Cycling As-

sociation for passports to proceed to Britain independently. This may be the first of similar applications from other white athletic organisations.

Mr de Klerk said recently the Government was sympathetic toward and prepared to assist white and non-white sports associations as long as they did not deviate from South African custom whereby whites and non-wbites organised their own sporting activities separately.

In Djakarta it was reported that Indonesia, whose suspension by the International Olympic Committee has been lifted, will take part in the Olympic Games in October.