The race that honored God

On a sweltering July afternoon in 1924, Eric Liddell walked onto the track in a Paris stadium carrying a trowel. Pinned to the front of his short-sleeved shirt was a piece of cloth bearing the number 451. When Liddell reached the track, he bent down and dug two small holes in the center of lane 6. 

Then he walked up to each of the other five competitors in the 400-meter dash final and shook their hands. Competing for Great Britain, Liddell had maneuvered through the opening 400 heat, the quarterfinals, and the semifinals with ease. Still, most experts gave him no chance at winning a medal. 

Now, he settled his black spikes into the starting holes he’d dug and listened as the public-address announcer called for silence from the 45,000 spectators gathered in the Stade Olympique Yves-du-Manoir. A hush fell over the stadium, and Liddell heard the announcer say, “To your marks.”

Moments earlier, one of the British team’s masseurs had handed a note to the 22-year-old Scottish runner: “In the old book, it says, ‘He that honors me, I will honor.’”

It was a fitting reminder for Liddell, who’d sacrificed much on his way to the 1924 Summer Olympics. It also turned out to be prophetic.

At the crack of the starter’s pistol, Liddell bounded forward. He covered the first 200 meters at a blistering pace: 22.2 seconds. He ran harder, if possible, in the second 200, finishing 5 meters ahead of the second man to cross the line, the bespectacled American Horatio Fitch.

Thunderous applause cascaded from the stands to the track. Liddell’s gold medal finish surprised everyone, including Liddell. Even more surprising: His sizzling 47.6-second sprint set two records, one for the world and one for the Olympics.

“The strange thing was that, despite the race I had run, and the time I had run it in, I was … not in the least distressed. I felt perfectly strong,” Liddell told a reporter for The Glasgow Herald, when asked to analyze his performance.

Fitch, who had set a world record in the semifinals, was astonished that someone could sprint the entire 400 meters.

“Our coach told us not to worry about Liddell because he was a sprinter, and he’d pass out 50 yards from the finish,” Fitch recalled in an interview 60 years later with Mike Tymn, author of Running on Third Wind. “I had no idea he’d win it.”

But Liddell, known as the “Flying Scotsman,” told reporters after his victory that he employed a simple but effective strategy. “I run the first 200 meters as hard as I can. Then for the second 200 meters, with God’s help, I run harder.”

Despite his unexpected win 100 years ago, Liddell is best known for the Olympic race he didn’t run. A year before the 1924 games, Liddell set the British record for the 100-yard dash: 9.7 seconds. That made him the hands-down favorite to win the race at the Paris Olympics, a victory that would have secured him the unofficial title of “world’s fastest man.”

But five months before the 1924 games, Liddell learned the 100-meter heats would take place on a Sunday. He decided not to compete, believing that doing so would violate the Fourth Commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” British track association members tried to persuade Liddell to change his mind. They argued he could attend church on Sunday morning and still compete in the 100-meter heats in the afternoon.

Liddell refused to compromise. “My Sabbath lasts all day,” he told them. He turned his attention instead to the 400-meter dash.

Liddell wasn’t built like a runner. At almost 5-foot-9 and 150 pounds, he had a bull neck, a barrel chest above slender legs, and an unorthodox racing technique: flailing arms, head flung back, and mouth agape at the finish line. But it worked. Although he didn’t compete in the 100-meter race in 1924, the British record he set the year before stood for another 23 years.

Liddell was an amateur sportsman in every sense of the term and received no prize money or endorsements for the gold he won in the 400-meter dash—on a Friday—or the bronze medal he won a few days earlier in the 200-meter dash. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t well known, especially in England and Scotland.

Sports journalists often hounded him, encounters he went to great lengths to avoid. Upon leaving Edinburgh once by train, he asked a porter if he could borrow his cap and cart. Then he walked by the unsuspecting reporters with his luggage.

He also was in great demand as a public speaker. Not dynamic but sincere, Liddell often drew crowds of more than a thousand people. During one address at an Edinburgh church, Liddell urged his listeners to seek the same motivation that drove him: “One who is worthy of all our devotion—Christ. He is the Savior for the young as well as the old. He is the one who can bring out the best in us.”

Shortly after returning to Scotland from Paris, Liddell graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a bachelor of science degree. He was crowned with a laurel garland and carried in a chair through Edinburgh by fellow graduates.

Liddell’s Olympic moment faded into history until the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire retold the story. The film, with its iconic, electronic opening theme by Vangelis, won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Music. But Liddell’s storied sports career was only the opening chapter of his life. His real work began a year after the 1924 Olympics.

Born in China to missionary parents, Liddell felt the call to return. “I believe God made me for China,” he told everyone who asked about his surprise decision.

In 1925, the London Missionary Society sent him to the port city of Tianjin in north China, where he taught science and Bible classes at a boys’ college. He also guided the school’s athletic teams.

And he continued to race. With little training, he competed in the 1928 Far Eastern Games in China. He won the 200-meter race in 21.8 seconds, and took the 400-meter in 47.8 seconds. He equaled the winning times at the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam later that year.

Although he was mostly out of the limelight, journalists still sought him out years after the Olympics. Canadian sports writer Robert Knowles once asked him, “Don’t you miss the limelight, the rush, the frenzy, the cheers, the rich red wine of victory?”

“It’s natural for a chap to think over all that sometimes, but I’m glad I’m at the work I’m engaged in now,” Liddell replied. “A fellow’s life counts for far more at this than the other. Not a corruptible crown, but an incorruptible, you know.”

In late 1937, the London Missionary Society transferred Liddell to Xiaochang on the north China plain, where he became a rural evangelist. There he joined his brother Rob, a missionary physician, at a compound that included a hospital, a school, a church, and living quarters.

Shortly before his transfer, Japan invaded China. The staff at the compound regularly heard the bark of machine guns and the explosion of artillery shells in the distance.

But Liddell’s work continued. He traveled by bicycle or on foot, visiting churches, advising pastors, or assisting the peasants any way he could. The Japanese military regularly murdered Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant. To protect himself and hide his work, Liddell wore a Red Cross armband in the countryside. When he did encounter Japanese soldiers, Liddell treated them with a broad smile and humility. They often remembered his performance in the Far Eastern Games and allowed him to pass.

As the war spun out of control, Liddell risked his life searching for the wounded and transporting them to the mission hospital. Because of the mounting danger, Liddell’s pregnant wife Florence and his two daughters left China in 1941, sailing on a ship headed for Canada. Waving goodbye from the wharf, Liddell didn’t expect he would never see them again.

In 1943, the Japanese ordered all foreigners to an internment camp at Weihsien in northern China. Once an American Presbyterian mission, the camp crammed 1,800 internees from a dozen nations into a space not much larger than a football field. Unbowed, Liddell taught the children mathematics and science. He also became director of sports and even ran in races inside the compound.

In addition to his official duties, according to his fellow prisoners, he pumped water, cleaned latrines, chopped wood, rolled coal balls, removed garbage, worked in the kitchen, and carted sacks of food supplies. No job was too menial and, it is said, he never complained.

With his family on the other side of the globe, Liddell became the surrogate parent to hundreds of children, who called him “Uncle Eric.” He made himself so available that his roommate posted a flip-card sign on the door, stating “Eric Liddell is in/out.”

“Liddell was without doubt the person most in demand and most respected and loved in the camp,” fellow prisoner George King later recalled.

How was Liddell able to manage the heavy workload and maintain equanimity from sunup to sundown for two years?

“First, have a prayer hour,” Liddell said. “Second, keep it.”

Duncan Hamilton, one of Liddell’s biographers, admitted in the prologue to his book, For the Glory, that the runner-­turned-missionary seemed too good to be true: too virtuous, too honorable. But in the dozens of interviews Hamilton conducted during his research, he found no one who could recall “a single act of envy, pettiness, hubris, or self-­aggrandizement.”

Like most people in the camp, 43-year-old Liddell suffered from malnutrition and lost weight. His gait slowed and his head ached. His declining health masked a bigger problem: an inoperable brain tumor.

On Feb. 21, 1945, Liddell was seized by several convulsions in the camp hospital. He fell into a coma and died soon after. According to the archives at the University of Edinburgh, his final words to his friend and nurse, Annie Buchan, were, “It’s complete surrender.”

—Jim Irish is a sports writer whose work has appeared in multiple ­newspapers and magazines, including Runner’s World

This story has been corrected to reflect that Eric Liddell’s 1923 time in the 100-yard dash set a British record.

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