Chris de Broglio, one of the main movers behind apartheid South Africa’s exclusion from international sport, has died at his home in Corsica. Chris was a founding member of SANROC, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, and helped secure South Africa’s withdrawal from the 1964 and 1968 Olympics and its expulsion from the Olympic movement in 1970.
Harassed by the South African security police, Chris moved to London in 1964 and set up a SANROC committee in exile. In the mid-1960s he tirelessly lobbied world sports federations to exclude South Africa and was present at the inaugural meeting of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa in 1966. With the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Stop the Seventy Tour, SANROC organised a campaign that forced the cancellation of the all-white Springbok cricket tour of England and Wales in 1970.
Chris was born in Mauritius in 1930 and moved to Durban in the late 1940s. He was South African Weightlifting Champion from 1950 to 1962. Because of his involvement in non-racial weightlifting associations, he was threatened with expulsion from the all-white South African Weightlifting Association.
In 1987, he helped set up the historic meeting in Dakar between the ANC and leading Afrikaners, which signalled the beginning of the end of apartheid. He was awarded the Olympic Order in recognition of his action against racism in sport.
Chris moved back to Mauritius and then Corsica, where he died on 12 July 2014.
Chris is remembered with respect and affection by his many friends in the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Hamba Kahle, Chris!