麻豆约拍

Fifty years ago Gareth Edwards found himself in the eye of a storm. As a 22-year-old rugby player and rising superstar, Gareth was called on to captain the Welsh side against South Africa. Stepping on the pitch was fulfilling a lifelong dream for Gareth, but he was stepping into a storm of protest. Anti-apartheid protests raged throughout the three-month Springbok tour, making it the most protested and disrupted tour in the history of the game. Gareth had selected friend and team-mate John Taylor to play that day, but John turned down the place down on principle; the only player to do so.

Now, 50 years on, Gareth sets out to track down those who organised the protests, and those who were targeted. He travels to South Africa to discover how the 1969-70 tour, the protests and the successful Lions tour of South Africa in 1974 impacted people there.

For the first time ever, Gareth and John Taylor speak about why he made the choice he did. Gareth meets Lord Peter Hain, then the 19-year-old organiser of a national protest. He meets HO de Villiers, one of the South African players targeted by protesters, and Peter de Villiers, a former Springbok coach , who in 1974, was just a rugby fan and recalls the segregation in the stands and life as a black person under apartheid.

In 1974, the Lions鈥� tour to South Africa was an incredible adventure for a young Gareth. But now, he discovers what was happening for those living in the country at that time, including the acceleration of segregation. He meets Cassiem Jabaar, a black rugby player barred from playing for South Africa鈥檚 national team because of the colour of his skin. Jabaar tells Gareth: 鈥淵ou can not say you were better than me, nor can I say that I was better than you, because we never played together on the same day.鈥�

In Cape Town, Gareth meets Francois Pienaar who recounts winning the World Cup for South Africa in 1995 and the symbolic moment of unification after apartheid ended. Nelson Mandela presented Pienaar with the trophy wearing the shirt of the Springboks 鈥� a shirt once hated by many as the symbol of apartheid.

Finally, Gareth travels to see a game in a township in Port Elizabeth and witnesses for himself the present day cost of apartheid for millions of people in South Africa. While he is there, he hears the heart-rending story of a young man from the township with a connection to Welsh rugby.