Eric Liddell: The Race He Would Not Run

On Sunday 6 July 1924, the heats of the men’s 100 metres were run at the Olympic Games in Paris. Crowds filled the stadium at Colombes, on the edge of the city. Athletes from all over the world crouched at the start, waiting for the gun, and the fastest of them went through to the next round.

The man many people in Britain had expected to win the race was not there. Eric Liddell, a twenty-two-year-old science student from Edinburgh, held the British record for the 100 yards. That Sunday, by the accounts that have come down to us, he was across the city at the Scots Kirk, the Scottish church in Paris, where he had been asked to speak.

He had not pulled out at the last minute. He had decided months before, as soon as he learned the heats would be on a Sunday, told the people in charge quietly, and started training for a longer race nobody expected him to win.

To many people at the time it looked foolish, even unpatriotic. To Eric it was simple. Sunday was the Lord’s Day. He had kept it all his life. He was not going to stop for a gold medal.

How a shy boy, raised mostly without his parents, came to hold that line in front of the whole country is a story that starts not in Paris or Edinburgh but in China.

Born in Tientsin

Eric Henry Liddell was born on 16 January 1902 in Tientsin (now usually written Tianjin), a busy port city in northern China. His parents, James and Mary Liddell, were Scottish missionaries with the London Missionary Society. James had come to China to preach and teach; Mary had come out to marry him. Eric was their second son. His brother Rob was two years older, and a sister, Jenny, and a younger brother, Ernest, came later.

It was a dangerous time to be a foreigner in China. Two years before Eric’s birth, in the uprising foreigners called the Boxer Rebellion, many missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians had been killed, caught up in anger at the foreign powers that had forced their way into China. The Liddells stayed. They believed the good news of Jesus was for the Chinese people as much as for anyone in Scotland.

Eric’s first years were spent in China, among Chinese neighbours and Chinese voices. But missionary families of that time faced a hard choice. There were few schools for foreign children in China, and the custom was to send them home to Britain to be educated, often for years at a time.

In 1907 the family went home to Scotland on leave, and in 1908, when Eric was six and Rob eight, the two boys were enrolled at a boarding school in London called the School for the Sons of Missionaries. Then their parents went back to China.

Try to imagine it: a six-year-old in a strange city, waving goodbye to his mother and father. For long stretches of his childhood Eric saw his parents only when they came back to Britain on leave. They believed they were obeying God, as did thousands of missionary families. But the cost fell on the children, and it is right to say so. Eric did not complain about it later. He had Rob, and the two brothers stayed close. Still, the boy who grew up to be famous for his quiet, steady kindness had learned very early what it was to be far from home.

The School for the Sons of Missionaries

In 1912 the school moved to new grounds at Mottingham, on the south-eastern edge of London, and took the name Eltham College. It was a school full of boys like Eric: sons of missionaries from China, India and Africa, whose parents were on the other side of the world.

Eric was shy. Teachers and classmates who remembered him later spoke of a quiet, modest boy, not especially bookish, not a leader who pushed himself forward, and kind to younger boys. What changed things was sport. Eric turned out to be fast, and strong for his size, and very good at games. By his later years at the school, by most accounts, he was captain of both the rugby and the cricket teams, and he was winning races on the school sports days. Rob was a fine athlete too. The two Liddell boys were well known around the school.

What about his faith? There is no dramatic conversion story for Eric Liddell, no night in a storm or sermon that turned his life around, and it would be wrong to invent one. He grew up in a Christian family and a Christian school, with daily prayers, chapel and Bible teaching. Somewhere in those years, quietly, what he had been taught became his own. The people who knew him as a young man describe someone who already prayed and read his Bible every day because he wanted to, not because a teacher was watching.

Many teenagers raised in Christian homes worry that their faith is not “real” because they cannot point to a dramatic moment. Eric could not point to one either. What he could point to was a life: he kept choosing, again and again, to take Jesus at his word.

He was not a loud Christian, either. Those who knew him said he rarely talked about himself and found speaking in public very hard.

The Fastest Man in Scotland

In 1920, at eighteen, Eric followed Rob to the University of Edinburgh to study science. For a while his parents were back in Scotland on leave, and the family lived together in Edinburgh, something Eric had hardly known since he was six. Then they went back to China again.

At first Eric did not take running seriously. In 1921, by the usual account, friends persuaded him to enter the university sports, and his speed astonished everyone, possibly including himself. Soon he was being trained by Tom McKerchar, a well-known Edinburgh athletics coach, who taught him to start properly and to look after his body. He also played rugby, as a fast winger, and in 1922 and 1923 he won seven caps for Scotland, which meant he played seven times for his country in international matches. Before he had finished his degree, he was a national sporting hero.

His running style was famous, and not because it was elegant. In the final stretch Eric would throw his head back, chin to the sky, arms flailing, mouth open, as if he had forgotten technique altogether and was simply pouring everything into going faster. Coaches winced. Crowds loved it.

In July 1923, at the national championships in London, he won the 100 yards in 9.7 seconds, a British record that lasted for decades, and won the 220 yards too.

A week or so later came the race that people who saw it never forgot. At an international meeting at Stoke-on-Trent, in the English Midlands, Eric was running the 440 yards, a lap of the track, when early on he was bumped by another runner and stumbled off the track onto the grass. By the time he got back on, the others were far ahead, by some accounts around twenty yards. He set off after them, head back, arms going, and caught and passed them all to win. Then he collapsed. The details vary from telling to telling, but the main fact is not in doubt: he won a race he had already lost.

He was twenty-one. People began to talk about the Olympic Games in Paris the next summer.

Armadale

That spring, something else happened to Eric that he found far more frightening than any race.

In April 1923, a young Scottish evangelist named D. P. Thomson came to see Eric in Edinburgh. Thomson was organising meetings for the Glasgow Students’ Evangelistic Union, a group of students who went out to towns and villages to tell people about Jesus, and he had an idea. He was planning a meeting for men in Armadale, a mining town between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and he wanted to bring in a speaker the men would actually come to hear. Who better than the famous young rugby player and sprinter? Would Eric come and speak?

Eric said yes.

That may not sound like much. But Eric hated speaking in public, and rarely talked about his faith even to his friends. Saying yes meant standing in front of a hall full of working men, many of whom had come only to look at a sportsman, and telling them what Jesus meant to him. In later years he spoke about how hard the decision had been for him, and he seems to have seen it as one of the most important he ever made. It seems to have been the moment he stopped keeping his faith to himself.

The meeting was held on 6 April 1923. By Thomson’s account, far more men came than usual. Eric was not a polished speaker. He spoke simply and without drama about his faith in Christ, and the men listened. Newspapers reported it. And from then on he became one of the most sought-after speakers in Scotland, going with Thomson and the students to town after town. Huge crowds came, at first to see the athlete. Many stayed to hear what he had to say.

What did he say? We do not have word-for-word reports of most of those talks, and it would be dishonest to invent them. But we know what he believed, because he lived it and later wrote about it. He believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, who had died for the sins of the world, his own included, and had risen again. He believed that knowing God’s forgiveness through Christ was the most important thing in any life, more important than records or medals. And he believed that following Jesus meant handing over the whole of your life to God: your time, your ambitions, your talents, your will. The word he came back to again and again, all his life, was surrender.

That is what made the decision about Paris possible. A young man who had already decided that his life belonged to God would not find a Sunday race much of a question.

The Timetable

Sometime in late 1923 or early 1924 (the exact date is not certain), the timetable for the Paris Olympics reached the British athletics officials. Eric learned that the heats of the 100 metres, his best event, would be held on a Sunday. So would some of the relay heats.

The film Chariots of Fire, made in 1981, tells this part of the story differently. In the film, Eric learns about the Sunday heats only as he is boarding the boat to France, and there is a tense scene in which officials and even the Prince of Wales try to persuade him to change his mind, until a teammate offers to give up his own place in the 400 metres. It makes great drama, but it did not happen that way. Eric knew months in advance, told the officials early and calmly, and was entered for the 200 and 400 metres instead. The film also invented scenes, rearranged races, and gave his sister Jenny a disapproval of his running that, by the family’s accounts, she did not really have. It is a fine film. It is not a documentary.

Why would Eric give up his best race? He had grown up keeping Sunday as a day set apart for God: for worship and rest, not for work or competition. Many Scottish Christians of his time did the same. He took seriously God’s command in the Ten Commandments: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” (Exodus 20:8). For him, as for most Christians, the Lord’s Day was Sunday, the day Jesus rose from the dead.

Christians today hold different views about Sunday, and plenty of good Christians have competed on it. Eric never made a speech about it or criticised anyone else. What is striking is not the rule but the man. He had a conviction, and he would not trade it, even when the reward was a gold medal and the price was being called a traitor to his country. Some newspapers and some sports officials thought he was letting Britain down. He did not argue with them. He simply did not run.

Nor did he sulk. He spent the months before Paris training for the 400 metres, which asks a sprinter to run nearly flat out for a whole lap while his legs fill with pain. Most experts did not think he could win it.

Paris

The Paris Games opened in July 1924. On Sunday 6 July, while the 100 metres heats were run, Eric was at church. The next day the 100 metres final was won by his British teammate Harold Abrahams.

On Wednesday 9 July, Eric ran in the final of the 200 metres and came third, winning a bronze medal behind two Americans. It was a good result. But the 400 metres was still to come, and in the heats and semi-finals he had been running faster than anyone expected.

On the morning of the final, Friday 11 July, Eric was handed a small piece of paper. Most accounts say it came from one of the team masseurs, the men who rubbed down the athletes’ muscles; in the film it is handed over by an American runner. The note quoted, in the old King James words, a promise God made in the Old Testament: “them that honour me I will honour” (1 Samuel 2:30, KJV). We do not know exactly what Eric thought when he read it. But it must have meant a great deal to a young man who had been told for months that honouring God was costing him his chance.

The final was run later that day. Eric had drawn the outside lane, the worst place to run from, because with the staggered start he could not see the other runners behind him. He would have to run the whole race blind, not knowing whether he was winning.

When the gun fired he went off as if the race were 200 metres instead of 400, and he did not slow down. He was ahead at halfway. Observers expected him to fade, as runners who go out too fast usually do. He did not. Head back, arms flailing, he held on and crossed the line first, in 47.6 seconds, an Olympic record. The American Horatio Fitch was second and the Briton Guy Butler third.

About a week later, back in Edinburgh, Eric graduated from the university with his science degree. When he went up to receive it, the university’s principal placed a crown of olive leaves on his head, the prize of the ancient Greek games, and his fellow students carried him out on their shoulders.

He was twenty-two, a champion, and could have had almost any career he wanted.

He chose China.

What Came After

Eric had decided long before that he would follow his parents back to the land where he was born. After a year studying theology in Edinburgh, he sailed for China in 1925 to teach science and sport at the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin, a school run by his parents’ mission for Chinese boys. He spoke Chinese, coached the boys, helped to run a Sunday school at a church in the city, and was known for his patience and his laughter. He still raced now and then, and he still won. But he never went back to the Olympics. He believed he was where God wanted him.

In 1932, home on leave, he was ordained as a minister. In 1934 he married Florence Mackenzie, the daughter of Canadian missionaries in Tientsin, and they had two daughters, Patricia and Heather.

China in those years was being torn apart. In 1937 Japan launched a full-scale invasion, and much of northern China became a war zone. That same year Eric left the comfortable college to work in the countryside around Siaochang (Xiaozhang), on the plain south-west of Tientsin, where his brother Rob, now a doctor, ran a mission hospital. It was dangerous, exhausting work: travelling between villages to preach and encourage Chinese Christians, often between Chinese and Japanese soldiers, and helping to bring the sick and wounded to the hospital. Those years cost him his health and much of his strength. They also show the shape of the man. He did not go to China to be a famous foreigner. He went to serve.

By 1941 the danger was so great that Eric sent Florence and the girls to safety in Canada. Florence was expecting their third child. He planned to join them later. He never did. In December 1941 Japan went to war with Britain and America, and in 1943 Eric was taken, with about eighteen hundred other foreign civilians, many of them children, to an internment camp at Weihsien (now Weifang), in Shandong province. His third daughter, Maureen, was born in Canada. He never met her.

Life in the camp was crowded and hungry, and many of the children there were separated from their parents, as Eric had once been. He became, by every account, one of the people who held the camp together. He taught science to the teenagers, organised games and races, refereed matches, helped carry coal and water for older people, and spent time with anyone who was struggling. Survivors remembered him as “Uncle Eric.” One story they told later is that he at first refused to referee games on Sundays, but when the teenagers organised their own Sunday game without him and it ended in a fight, he came the next week and refereed. Whether or not every detail is right, it is the kind of story told about a man who held his convictions firmly but cared more about people than about winning arguments. Some who were young in the camp also remembered him teaching them to pray for their Japanese guards, because Jesus said, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).

In early 1945 he became ill. He was exhausted, and he suffered headaches and strange weakness. On 21 February 1945 he died, at forty-three. After his death the doctors found he had had a brain tumour that could not have been treated even outside the camp, though overwork and hunger had worn him down too. The camp was freed by American soldiers six months later.

A nurse in the camp, Annie Buchan, was with him near the end. She remembered his last words, and they sum up what he had believed since he was a young man in Edinburgh: that the whole of life belongs to God, and the best thing to do with it is to give it back.

Many people who know nothing else about Eric Liddell know a line from Chariots of Fire in which he says that God made him fast, and that when he runs he feels God’s pleasure. It is a beautiful line. But it was written for the film; there is no record that Eric ever said it. The real words he left behind were plainer, and they cost more.

In Their Own Words

“It’s complete surrender.”

— Eric Liddell, his last words, as remembered by the camp nurse Annie Buchan (Weihsien, 1945)

Think It Through

1. Eric had no dramatic conversion story. His faith grew quietly in a Christian home and school until it became his own. Does a faith need a dramatic beginning to be real? How would you know whether your faith is your own?
2. Eric decided about the Sunday heats months ahead, calmly, without making speeches or criticising anyone. What is the difference between holding a conviction firmly and using it to look down on other people?
3. For Eric, saying yes to speak at Armadale was harder than any race. What is the thing you would find hardest to do for God? What might happen if you said yes?
4. Eric was famous at twenty-two and chose to spend his life as a teacher in China, away from the crowds. What does that suggest about what success really is?

Read More on Ochorus

Eric Liddell’s own writings are not in the library. You can read a short version of his life for younger readers in Brave for God: Book Two, in the chapter “Eric Liddell: The Runner Who Would Not Run on Sunday”. His story belongs alongside the other young people in this book who were sent, and the Scripture that held him, from the Ten Commandments to the Sermon on the Mount, is always there to read.