Abstract
This thesis explores some of the intersections of sport, politics, identity, and pharmacological enhancement in apartheid-era South African cycling during the 1970s and 1980s. While much scholarship on South African sport has concentrated on internationally prominent codes such as rugby, cricket, and football, this study foregrounds road cycling as a culturally rich yet underexplored arena through which the logics of apartheid were enacted, contested, and, at times, doped.
Through a combination of oral history interviews with former cyclists and archival research into contemporary newspapers, federations, and event materials, the study reconstructs aspects of the internal culture of South African cycling during a period of growing political isolation and internal consolidation of the sport. Interviews with former cyclists, many of whom competed in the Rapport Tour, help to reveal the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), as well as ambivalent attitudes towards state authority, bodily limits, and racing. PED use, often rationalised as necessary for national pride or personal survival, is analysed not simply as a biomedical practice but as a social and cultural phenomenon entangled with the racialised ideologies of the time.
The thesis also interrogates the institutional terrain of apartheid-era cycling, including the shifting alliances and tensions between white-only and multiracial sporting bodies. This complexity was shaped in part by the apartheid state’s adoption of a “multinational” sports policy, an effort to present racially segregated sports as legitimate expressions of separate development, based on “national” (racial) identities within South Africa. Within these contradictory frameworks, Black cyclists often found ways to navigate, resist, and even succeed in systems not built for them, sometimes in surprising and revealing ways.
The study begins to contribute new empirical and conceptual insights to South African sports history and broader historiographies of doping and masculinity. It shows how apartheid cycling’s performance culture – chemical, symbolic, and ideological – offers a revealing lens into the contradictions and ambitions of white South African nationalism under strain.