Sports contacts

Press, 26 July 1984, Page 16

Sports contacts

Sir,—Just as Wimbledon and open golf tournaments are open to all comers so should the Olympic Games be open to all. Otherwise winners can not be considered true world champions. In all sports true sportsmanship demands that differences in race, colour, creed, and politics or personal frailties should be disregarded in the tolerance, friendship, uplift and mutual appreciation that well-run sports engender. For this reason I felt that our representatives should have gone to Moscow in 1980 and I now feel sorry that the Soviet Union, South Africa and black Africans are not competing in Los Angeles. Bruce Davidson’s television documentary on Africa must arouse feelings of deep shame and remorse for all that our European forbears inflicted on hapless Africans; but does freedom and black self-government mean loss of self-government for all white Africans? Should all white South C Africans still be treated as lepers?

There must have been other potential world champions like Zola Budd. — Yours, etc., E. MULCOCK. July 22, 1984. Sir,—New Zealanders who showed more patriotism than Mr Lange has been asked to do, fought and died in two world wars. How dare he put that word, patriotism, on the line in connection with rugby. Because the Soviet-advised African nations say, “Either rugby or the Games,” he is prepared to take away this people’s freedom to make sporting contacts. Weighed against South Africa’s repressive treatment of blacks, the Soviet Union comes out a clear winner for torture and oppression of its own people, and subjugation of others it has conquered by the gun. If Mr Lange bows to Soviet highwayman tactics to get the Games, let him not call it patriotism. What, right have these nations to say, “Your money or your life?” We do not practise torture. Why should our sportsmen be penalised? — Yours, etc V. H. ANDERSON. July 22, 1984.