New Zealand’s decision to send the All Blacks to apartheid South Africa in 1976 created an international sporting crisis years before the explosive 1981 Springbok Tour. The tour was approved by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, even though South African rugby authorities continued to select teams by race and New Zealand’s own sporting relationship with South Africa had already become a target of anti-apartheid activists. Twenty-five African nations boycotted the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, arguing that the All Blacks’ tour gave tacit support to the apartheid regime. The International Olympic Committee refused to ban New Zealand because rugby union was not part of the Olympic program, leaving the boycott as one of the most visible political consequences of the tour.
The controversy was also bitterly contested at home. On 28 March 1976, ten days before former All Black Fergie McCormick’s final match at Christchurch’s Lancaster Park, protesters used weed-killer to write “WELCOME TO RACIST GAME” in enormous letters across the pitch. Another demonstration in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square attracted between 1,000 and 1,500 people and used guerrilla theatre to protest the tour. Protesters later attempted to disrupt television coverage of the first test by vandalising the Makara Hill microwave station near Wellington, although broadcasts continued through a separate transmission system. The political damage helped produce the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement, under which Commonwealth leaders pledged to discourage sporting competition with South African teams. That agreement became the central point of dispute when Muldoon’s government permitted the Springboks to tour New Zealand in 1981.
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