OLYMPIC SPIRIT
WHAT HAPPENED TO ERIC LIDDELL AFTER CHARIOTS OF FIRE?
For the Glory: Eric Liddell’s Journey of Faith and Survival By Duncan Hamilton Random House Canada 400 pp; $28
Eric Liddell is best known as the protagonist of the movie Chariots of Fire: the inspiring true story of two athletes, Eric Liddell (“The Flying Scotsman”) and Harold Abrahams (“The Cambridge Cannon Ball”), rival runners with their hearts set on winning gold in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Abrahams burns with resentment over anti-Semitic slights and yearns to win the 100 metre race and the title of “world’s fastest man.” Liddell, on the other hand, is a dedicated Scots missionary who aims all for the glory of God.
Liddell meets a test of that devotion soon enough when he discovers that the 100 metre race is scheduled for a Sunday. Will Liddell break the Sabbath? Liddell seems not even tempted: rather than break the Sabbath, he will run the 400 metre event on a different day – though this means that he must overhaul his entire approach to racing.
In British sportswriter Duncan Hamilton’s biography For the Glory: Eric Liddell’s Journey of Faith and Survival, Abrahams quickly fades to the sidelines; indeed, Hamilton takes pains to point out how much the movie, which focused on the Liddell-Abrahams rivalry, features one invented scene after another. Hamilton also signals that his biography transcends the Paris Olympics by beginning his narrative with Liddell running a foot race in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. It is here, where the inmates live on the brink of starvation, that the reader gets the full measure of the man. It is also here, where the reader sees Liddell overlooking the faults of others, that Hamilton fashions the keystone of what is really a hagiography – a chronicle of a Protestant saint.
Liddell’s life began on January 16, 1902. It is almost charming to read the author’s description of Liddell’s youthful training at the hands of such dedicated coaches as Cambridge University’s Tom McKerchar, a man who believed strongly in massage before a run. Generally it was not a scientific era in training: in addition to massage, smoking was sometimes advocated on the grounds, as one coach put it, that it “cleared the lungs and improved breathing capacity.”
Attempting to coach himself, Liddell got his hands on a book entitled How to Become a Great Athlete, published in 1911 by a German named Max Sick, who “drew crowds to variety halls,” Hamilton writes, “after learning how to make his muscles twitch in synchronization with music played from the orchestra pit.” Liddell admired Sick’s photographs, with Sick boasting that he was “the most wonderfully developed and strongest man of my weight.”
One physical aspect of Liddell that puzzled onlookers from an early age was his awkwardness. “There was an ungainly frenzy about him,” Hamilton writes. “Liddell swayed, rocking like an overloaded express train, and he threw his head well back, as if studying the sky rather than the track ... His arms pumped away furiously and his knee-lift was extravagantly high, like a pantomime horse.”
However, this running style seemed to work for him, as numerous coaches, eager to increase the runner’s bodily efficiency, discovered.
But it was Liddell’s piety that seemed the real mystery, one that drove him to speak in churches, homes, schools, auditoriums, lecture halls – anywhere a crowd could gather. Hamilton doesn’t give the reader a clear idea of why Liddell could draw audiences other than his fame as an athlete. He was not a fire- and- brimstone ranter or a silver- tongued orator, but he did seem to have a knack for entertaining his listeners.
He also seemed able to convince audiences that his brand of Christianity was unremittingly good for them, like a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables or a set of well- fitting clothes. What Liddell thought about various, unedifying theological controversies – such as the literal interpretation of the Bible, or Darwin – we have little clue except that we know Liddell never much questioned traditional doctrines. Hamilton does use the word “fundamentalist” at one point to suggest preachers who laid down the law in an obsessive or narrowminded fashion, but Liddell was never of that ilk. To the end of his life Liddell convincingly portrayed Christianity as an unselfish, generous and kind-hearted way of life.
For a long time after Liddell won that 400 metre race in Paris, his faith was put under no undue strain. Even when he fulfilled his long-term goal and became a missionary in China in 1929, teaching science and sports at the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin, life was reasonably well ordered. “His teaching duties were a pleasure,” Hamilton writes. “His preaching duties were not over strenuous. Every August there was the bonus of another holiday and days of sea bathing, shell hunting, and beach picnics.” Described by friends as one of “nature’s noblemen,” he circumspectly courted the daughter of a missionary family and married her in 1934, with happy results.
Then the war between China and Japan escalated. Pregnant with their third child, Liddell’s wife and their two daughters made their way to Canada, and Liddell spent the war as a prisoner of the Japanese until he died of heart failure in February 1945. If there was a time for Liddell’s faith to buckle, it was in those years in internment camp. But he held firm. “Everywhere the camp was under pressure,” Hamilton writes. “Without the likes of Liddell, the camp would have come apart. He was a singularity in it – a one man task force. Every morning he wound himself up for another great burst of work.”
This was another kind of endurance, and more permanent in its effects than an Olympic foot race.
THIS STORY OF ERIC LIDELL IS A HAGIOGRAPHY – A CHRONICLE OF A PROTESTANT SAINT