ABSTRACT
Even with the outcast South Africa debarred from the Olympic Movement, the Pretoria regime was central to the instability of the Games in 1976 in Montreal. A racial altercation involving the New Zealand–South Africa rugby rivalry played havoc with the Montreal Games. The conflict took place against the backdrop of the Soweto student uprising that began on June 16, 1976, a month prior to the opening of the Olympiad. Israel had participated in the Olympic Games for the first time in Helsinki in 1952. Discrimination against Israeli sportsmen continued in 1979. Camp David notwithstanding, Egypt's Ani Nazar refused to play his Israeli opponent in the World Cup junior tennis championships in Mexico City. In 2013, the word "boycott" was much bandied about in connection with the Sochi Winter Olympics. Sochi's seventeen-day Olympiad turned out to be an unexpectedly placid one. It was free of terrorism, and, at least at the athletic venues, gay activism was absent.
