The 1995 Rugby World Cup was held in South Africa just one year after the country's first democratic elections. Throughout the tournament, the importance of competition victory for the South African team — playing under the banner of `One Team, One Nation' and endorsed by President Mandela — was articulated by the team, the local media, politicians and by its supporters in terms of its centrality to the project of nation-building. This discourse dominated all others. What made this articulation of the event all the more remarkable was the historic connection of the game with Afrikaner popular culture and with the political interests of the previous apartheid regime. Drawing on Dyan and Katz's (1992) model of the `media event', the article examines the processes behind this attempt to rearticulate the meaning of `South African rugby' away from narrow, race-specific interests towards those of the newly elected non-racial ANC-led government's nation-building project.
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