South Africa will no longer have quotas for non-white players. In an attempt to stop their star players and coach from signing lucrative contracts with European teams, South African officials yesterday scrapped a long-held commitment to racial quotas for their national sports teams.
"Quotas are out," the sports minister Makhenkesi Stofile said.
"We are not going to decide who must be on the team. All we are saying is, expose everybody, give them an opportunity."
The government's back-tracking came after months of debate over its rugby team - South Africa's best hope in any sport of capturing a world title.
While the Springboks played a spectacular World Cup tournament, they did so with few black players, despite coming from a country with an 80 per cent black majority.
All but six of the 30-man rugby squad were white, and only two coloured Springboks played in the final.
The Springboks' winning head coach, Jake White, said that South Africa's racial politics were driving him out of the country.
For White and some of his players, the government's decision to drop racial quotas has came too late. Stofile said the new government plan would be to develop star black rugby players. That might require huge financial resources, however, including rugby training at poor, black-dominated schools.
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