Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, many Russian athletes have lost the opportunity to take part in international competitions.

Russian football and basketball clubs and national teams, gymnasts, athletes, swimmers were sanctioned, Russia was deprived of the right to host the World Hockey Championship and the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Sochi – the list goes on.

This is not the first time in the history of sports that this has happened. At one time, South Africa also faced similar sanctions – and they are believed to have played a role in the fall of the apartheid regime .

South Africans know firsthand about sports sanctions – South African athletes were marginalized from world sport to varying degrees from the 1960s until the fall of apartheid in 1991.

Sanctions, especially in the fields of sports, the economy, education, the arts and culture, played a decisive role in the end of apartheid and the establishment of a democratic order in South Africa in 1994.

“Sanctions, including sports sanctions, helped bring down the apartheid regime, so it makes sense to apply them to Russia as well,” Ali Baher, former head of South Africa’s joint cricket board, told the BBC.

“Unfortunately, Russian athletes have to suffer because of their leader, but the same thing happened to us South Africans. Many, including myself, did not support apartheid, but we also had to suffer the consequences of isolation,” says Baher .

Baher, 79, is a controversial figure in South African sports. In the 1980s, he organized sports tours to the country from the UK and Australia in an attempt to keep cricket in South Africa up to par.

These tours made headlines in Western newspapers more than once, but Baher was not only involved in them: in parallel, he made efforts to develop cricket in black settlements.

In 1991, with his active participation, the United Cricket Council was born. Baher made contacts and became friends with the head of the sports department of the African National Congress. As a result, South Africa was admitted to international cricket competition more than two years before the official end of the apartheid regime.

“Of course, sports sanctions were not the only thing that played a role in bringing down apartheid,” says Baher. cricket in the world, and we only returned to the world sport in 1991, so for 21 years global sanctions affected South African cricket. There is no doubt about that.”

The sanctions, however, failed to end the apartheid regime quickly.

By the time “whites only” South African sports organizations began to squeeze out of world sport, the apartheid laws introduced after the National Party’s election victory in 1948 had been in place for more than a decade.

In the late 1950s, the South African Football Association, which accepted only whites, was denied the right to participate in the first Africa Cup of Nations. In 1961, her FIFA membership was suspended, and in 1976 she was completely expelled.

In 1968, the South African government did not allow the England team, which included Basil D’Oliveira, a South African who fled apartheid, to make a planned tour of the country. A huge scandal broke out, provoking the international sports isolation of South Africa.

The all-white National Olympic Committee was banned from the 1964 and 1968 Olympics. In 1970, South Africa was completely excluded from the Olympic movement and its athletes were banned from participating in many competitions, from track and field to wrestling.

The visit of the Australian cricket team in 1969-70, when the white team under Baher defeated them 4-0, was the last official tour organized by the South African Cricket Association. Shortly thereafter, its activities were suspended indefinitely.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world pressed South Africa to release Nelson Mandela , who was sentenced to life in prison in 1964 after being found guilty of plotting to overthrow the government.

Anti-apartheid rallies were held around the world, and a crowded concert at London’s Wembley Stadium to celebrate Mandela’s 70th birthday was broadcast to 60 countries.

Given the interests of many countries in South Africa at that time, sport has become a powerful instrument of pressure on the country’s leadership.

“The growing international movement for the release of Mandela has been extremely helpful in isolating the apartheid regime – sport has played a very important role in this,” Professor Andre Odendaal, one of South Africa’s leading sports historians, told the BBC.

Odendaal recalls that Western countries had serious economic interests in South Africa, so the UK and the US, among others, supported the regime’s struggle against the liberation movement in the 1970s and early 80s.

“Soft sanctions, for example in sports, were more acceptable than loud calls for economic sanctions and oil cuts,” he says. “Key to the success of the sports boycott was that it touched a social dimension that had a huge impact on white South Africans. They always felt part of the colonial world, liked to talk about “the superiority of Western civilization in the blackest Africa.”

Throughout his long tenure as president of Russia, Vladimir Putin has promoted sports: the country spent huge amounts of money to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2018 FIFA World Cup, apart from smaller competitions.

The doping scandal in athletics has, among other things, highlighted the importance of sporting victories to the Russian regime – and to Russians’ sense of national pride in general.

The Russian authorities forbid talking about the war in Ukraine, calling it a “special operation.” But how to explain to citizens why Russian athletes and sports organizations are out of work?

Professor Odendaal reminds that sports organizations should demonstrate consistency in the application of sanctions.

“I stand in solidarity with those who are trying to use sanctions to help save the situation of the Ukrainian people,” he said. “But if you’re going to use the outbreak of war as an excuse to impose sanctions, you have to be consistent.”

“If you start supporting one country or another, depending on where the war is, it may happen that there will be no more Olympic Games,” continues Odendaal. “There are many conflicts, such as Saudi Arabia in Yemen, or conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, but there is no talk of imposing sanctions to normalize these situations.”

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