'The Flying Scotsman' Eric Liddell (© Getty Images)
At a ceremony held at the MOWA World Indoor Athletics Exhibition in the St. Enoch Centre, Glasgow, on 2 March, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe announced that a World Athletics Heritage Plaque would be awarded in the posthumous category of 'Legend' to 'The Flying Scotsman' Eric Liddell.
Thursday (11) marks the centenary of Liddell’s 400m victory in the Paris 1924 Olympic Games. The anniversary is being marked this year by the charity The Eric Liddell Community, which aims to bring his achievements to life and to inspire new generations to make a positive impact on their community, their society and their world through ‘The Eric Liddell 100’.
The bravest of Scots
As the six competitors prepared to take their marks for the Olympic men’s 400m final at Stade Colombes on the afternoon of 11 July 1924, the hush was temporarily broken by the Cameron Highlanders marching band striking up a swift rendition of ‘Scotland the Brave’.
There could not have been a more fitting note on which to herald one of the classic moments in track and field history, immortalised in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire with its memorable Vangelis theme-track.
Throughout his cruelly shortened life, Liddell was the bravest of Scots.
In his short track career, he stuck steadfastly to his Christian beliefs that Sundays should be a day of rest when the qualifying rounds for his favoured event, the 100m, were scheduled for the Sabbath at the Paris Olympics.
Amidst criticism from the press and the public, and pressure from the British Olympic Association, the Edinburgh University student – who was born in China, where his father worked as a Protestant missionary – refused to contemplate competing on a Sunday, taking up the 400m as his main event instead.
He ultimately sacrificed himself for his religion, perishing in a Japanese internment camp in 1945, aged just 43, after serving himself as a Christian missionary in perilous times in China.
Eric Liddell in action (© Getty Images)
200m bronze
When the pipes of the Cameron Highlanders faded into the Parisian air 100 years ago, Liddell proceeded to bolt from his starting holes like a man possessed and seized the day, and the Olympic 400m gold medal, in breathtaking fashion.
With his ungainly style – running with his head tilted back, facing heavenward, his mouth agape – and his lack of experience in the quarter mile, he was not regarded as a leading contender for the 400m crown, even after he claimed a bronze medal in the 200m, behind the US sprinters Jackson Scholz and Charley Paddock.
Many saw his refusal to compete on a Sunday as a sign of weakness in a man with a soft centre – indeed, such a gentle soul that he made a point of walking across to his rivals and shaking their hands before the 400m final got under way on the horseshoe-shaped 500m Colombes track.
“He must crack before the end”
In the preliminary rounds, two of those rivals had run the fastest times on record for the metric 400m (as opposed to 440 yards). Josef Imbach, a Swiss locksmith, clocked 48.0 in the quarterfinals and Horatio Fitch, an engineering graduate from the University of Illinois, ran 47.8 in the semifinals.
Liddell won his semifinal in 48.2. “Despite the times the others had put up, I felt fairly confident,” he later reflected. “I had been running well within myself, and I felt absolutely keyed up to run the race of my life.”
Which the 22-year-old proceeded to do – in the arena where he had made the first of seven appearances as a wing three-quarter for the Scottish rugby union team two years previously.
Running in the outside lane, the flying Scot reached halfway in 22.2, just 0.3 slower than his bronze medal-winning time in the 200m final.
Sitting in the stands opposite the finish line, a stunned Harold Abrahams, winner of the 100m and a disappointing sixth in the 200m, thought his Great Britain teammate had blown his chance.
“He went off at such a terrific pace that it seemed as if he must crack before the end,” said Abrahams. “It seemed impossible that he should last the distance.”
Eric Liddell is paraded by fellow students around Edinburgh University after his 1924 Olympic 400m title win (© Getty Images)
“I run the first 200m as hard as I could”
Upon learning of the Olympic timetable the previous November, Liddell had trained methodically for the 400m under the shrewd guidance of Tom McKerchar.
The wily Edinburgh University coach had drawn upon the stunning speed endurance Liddell showed when making up the numbers for Scotland in a 440 yards race against England and Ireland at Stoke in 1923; his charge fell at the start but retrieved a 20-yard deficit to win by 6 yards.
And such was Liddell’s basic speed, the 9.7 he clocked for the 100 yards at the AAA Championships stood as a British record for 35 years. Abrahams’ best legal time at the distance was 9.9. He only raced Liddell twice, finishing 0.4 behind on both occasions: in the 220 yards semifinals at the AAA Championships in 1923 and in the Olympic 200m final in Paris.
Over the second half of the Olympic 400m final, instead of fading, Liddell found a second wind, and then a third. He broke the tape in 47.6, a world record*, with Fitch a distant second in 48.4.
“I run the first 200m as hard as I could,” Liddell said of his approach to the one-lap event. “Then, for the second 200m, with God’s help, I run harder.”
“Fitch and the others may as well have been chasing an antelope startled into top speed,” wrote Grantland Rice, whose report for the New York Herald Tribune also described Liddell as having been propelled by “some divine power.”
Two days later Liddell was preaching from the pulpit at the Scots Kirk in Paris. The Bible text he read was from Psalm 119.18: “Open thou mine eyes, that I might behold wondrous things.”
Kept on running
Two years later Liddell joined his father in China and started working as a Christian missionary. He periodically dusted down his old running spikes, reportedly clocking 47.8 for 400m in 1928, the same as Ray Barbuti’s winning time in the Olympic final in Amsterdam that year.
He also ran two exhibition races in Tientsin against Otto Peltzer, holder of the 800m and 1500m world records, winning comfortably over 400m and finishing 0.1 behind the German over 800m.
Even in the squalor of Weihsien Internment Camp, the humble Liddell would be prevailed upon to take part in races around the compound – the last of them in August 1944, when he was a frail shadow of his former self.
Unknown to the Olympic champion of two decades previously, he was suffering from the brain tumour that was to kill him six months later. The Scottish braveheart still led for most of the way and finished up second.
Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage
*Ratified as a world record but was later removed due to an earlier faster performance by another athlete - Progression of World Athletics Records (2024 edition)
