ABSTRACT
The 1970s saw the Canadian government take a strong stand against apartheid sport policies. Despite Canada’s limited sporting links with South Africa, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his Liberal government carved out a leading Commonwealth position in promoting the isolation of South African sport. The catalyst for this leadership was Canada as host of two ‘mega’ sporting events during the 1970s: the 1976 Montréal Olympics and the 1978 Edmonton Commonwealth Games. It was these two events, and the legacy of the Montréal Olympic boycott, that proved to be a key driver of Canadian government policy with important consequences for the wider sporting development of the Commonwealth, notably the creation of the ‘Gleneagles Agreement’. This was an important and positive legacy of the 1976 Olympics, which has been overlooked in the controversy surrounding the better-known ‘negative’ legacy of debt incurred by the city.
