The Fire Still Burns Chariots of Fire is 40. No, it really is
Forty years after its release, Chariots of Fire, the Oscar-sweeping drama about two runners seeking Olympic glory for deeply personal reasons, remains a classic. Richard Askwith, who appears in the film as an extra, tells the full story
I’VE NEVER WON MUCH AS A RUNNER: FINISHERS’ MEDALS AND T-SHIRTS. BUT I DID ONCE WIN A RUNNING-RELATED OSCAR.
That’s what I tell my children, anyway. I base my spurious claim on some half-forgotten weeks in the spring of 1980, when I should have been working hard for my final exams as a Cambridge undergraduate, but spent most of my days on a film set instead.
It was a strange choice. I had no particular passion for film, and this one, a historical drama about longdead sprinters who attended the university in the 1920s, sounded pretty dull. But they were offering £10 a day.
Nothing I saw on set altered my view that the project was a turkey. The scraps of script we encountered seemed plodding and clichéd. No one had heard of the director (Hugh Hudson) or any of the so-called stars (Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Nigel Havers); and even the producer (David Puttnam) was known only to the serious luvvies among us. As for the sporting action that featured in our scenes, from close-up it seemed laughably unconvincing.
But my precocious judgment – on this as on most matters – was more fallible than I imagined. Chariots of Fire, which premiered 40 years ago, was a runaway success, critically, commercially and, not least, at the 1982 Oscars, where it won four of the seven Academy Awards for which it was nominated; one of which – I dubiously contend – could possibly have been in recognition of my contribution.
We’ll get to that. What’s interesting, all these years later, is the distance by which Chariots of Fire remains the best feature film ever made about running; and also, for me at least, how much more bizarre and unnatural the world that made it possible now seems.
If you haven’t seen it, do. If you have, watch it again. It has aged well. The period it evokes seems scarcely more distant today than it did 40 years ago, and the moral struggles at its creative core are timeless.
The film tells the story of a group of young British runners – Harold Abrahams, Eric Liddell, Aubrey Montague and Henry Stallard – who competed at the Paris Olympics in 1924; two of whom – Abrahams and Liddell – won golds. It isn’t 100 per cent true, but it’s based on truth, and the distortions generally serve creative purposes. In real life, there were three British track golds at those Games: Abrahams in the 100m, Liddell in the 400m and Douglas Lowe in the 800m. But Lowe didn’t want his story used and the resulting gap in the film was filled by a fictional character, Lord Lindsay, based partly on Lowe and partly on Lord Burghley (who won gold in the 400m hurdles at the next Olympics, in 1928).
Burghley and Lowe were both Cambridge undergraduates, as were Abrahams and Stallard. Montague was at Oxford, but in the film he is at Cambridge with the others. Such minutiae are hardly important, unless you’re a sports historian; nor does it really matter that, by the time of the Olympics, the heroes had ceased to be students. The crucial point from the story’s perspective is the
uncomplicated message of an Oxbridge backdrop – elegant, charmed and exclusive. Similarly, it barely matters that the film’s portrayal of Lord Lindsay’s training routine is a mild exaggeration of Lord Burghley’s, on which it is based. Lindsay has hurdles lined up in the grounds of his stately home and a glass of champagne balanced on each by his butler: his challenge is to clear each hurdle so cleanly that he doesn’t spill a drop. Burghley, in real life, used matchboxes, not champagne, and tried to knock them off, not leave them undisturbed; but there was nothing fictional about the stately home or the butler.
Stride and prejudice
THE BROADER TRUTH, which I hadn’t really grasped when the film was being made, is that amateur athletics in Britain was, for much of the 20th century, grotesquely skewed by this kind of privilege. Oxbridge men – better fed, better funded and more visible to the Oxbridge-educated selectors than athletes from humbler backgrounds – won seven of the 17 individual gold medals won by British athletes in Olympic running and hurdling events between 1896, when the modern Games began, and 1956. And, of course, for every Oxbridge Olympian who won gold in that 60-year period, there were several others who came back empty-handed. Many of the also-rans deserved their chance: Roger Bannister and Chris Chataway were hardly athletic nobodies. But for athletes without their advantages it was hardly a level playing field. Another great British miler, Derek Ibbotson, saw his hoped-for place in the 1500m in the 1956 Olympics given instead to a slower Oxford man. Ibbotson, who had to make do with a bronze at his less favoured distance of 5000m, was just a grammar school boy.
The bias was poignantly symbolised at the 1948 London Olympics by the choice of an unknown medical student, John Mark, to carry the torch into the stadium. This was a cruel snub to the great middledistance runner
Sydney Wooderson, who believed until the last minute he would be torch-bearer. But Mark, unlike Wooderson, was Oxbridge-educated, and (like the head of the organising committee, Lord Burghley) was a former president of the Cambridge University Athletics Club.
The divide was ideological, too. The establishment embraced amateurism: an idea that meant more than just not running for money. Athletes were supposed to compete for sheer love of sporting excellence; to run, as Abrahams puts it in Chariots of Fire, with ‘the apparent effortlessness of gods’ while remembering that, in the words of the Oxbridge-admiring father of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, ‘the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.’ To the amateurs, professionalism was the worst form of cheating; even a professional attitude was considered a betrayal.
To runners from humbler backgrounds, such as Gordon Pirie, amateurism was a ‘sham’: a code written and policed by an Oxbridge-educated elite who, unlike ordinary people, could afford to train and compete at the highest level without financial compensation. Pirie was contemptuous of the ‘elderly dictators’ of British athletics and their complacent reliance on ‘the Old School Tie and the Old Pals Act’; and they, in turn, regarded driven, non-Oxbridge types like him and Ibbotson as suspect outsiders. The suspicion was mutual and self-reinforcing. Pirie and Ibbotson set world records and won Olympic medals as amateurs, but ended their athletic careers by dabbling defiantly with the professional circuit.
Chariots of Fire gives powerful expression to both views. Abrahams, whose burning ambition to be a world-beating sprinter is attributed partly to his bruising experiences of anti-Semitism, hires a professional coach, Sam Mussabini, to improve •
“Chariots of
Fire remains the best feature film ever made about running
his technique. When the Masters of Trinity and Gonville & Caius colleges accuse him of ‘playing the tradesman’ with his single-minded focus on winning, our sympathies are firmly with Abrahams; just as they are with Mussabini when, barred from the Olympic stadium as a professional pariah, he spends the climactic final in his lonely hotel room, anxiously listening out for the postrace national anthem that will reveal the winner’s identity.
Yet the film is also a stirring evocation of the spirit of amateurism. From the moment we hear the first tingling electronic chords of Vangelis’ celebrated soundtrack, and see the pack of white-clad Olympic contenders running barefoot along a windswept beach, we sense that we are watching a story about youthful idealists, who ran, as one character puts it, ‘with hope in our hearts and wings on our heels’. This isn’t just a story about winning. It is a story of sporting innocence, whose young heroes are inspired, in part, by thoughts of the lost generation before them who, as the Master of Gonville & Caius reminds them on their arrival in Cambridge, ‘died for England and all that England stands for’ in the Great War – ‘and now,’ adds the Master, ‘by tragic necessity their dreams have become yours’.
Later, we see Eric Liddell training in Scottish glens, relishing the wind in his face; and, again, we are reminded of the thrill of running for its own sake. Hugh Hudson called it ‘the pure physical joy of being young’. Liddell puts it another way. ‘God made me for a purpose,’ he explains. ‘He also made me fast. And when I run I feel his pleasure.’ At times, we in the audience feel it too.
This is odd, because no genuinely fast running was involved in the making of the film. The actors were fit: they had been trained for several months by former Olympic coach Tom McNab. But they were no more athletes than we extras were; less so, in some cases. Look closely at the running sequences and you may well detect supposed also-rans who are struggling to run slowly enough to lose.
But that’s another strange thing about Chariots of Fire: there really aren’t many running sequences, and those that there are tend to be brief, or in long shot, or in slow motion. There is endless running-related excitement, but it comes from the inner dramas, not the action on the track. Perhaps that’s why the film remains so compelling. Nothing can match the sporting excitement of real elite sport. But dramatic excitement is a different matter. Drama is what actors and film-makers do best.
Licence to thrill
CHARIOTS OF FIRE is not a mould-breaking movie. It tells a wholesome, feel-good story with a minimum of complication or irony. Yet its simplicity allows it the creative space to indulge itself at its moments of greatest intensity.
Its two main characters, Abrahams and Liddell, are both portrayed, accurately, as relative outsiders. Abrahams was middle class, Jewish and obsessively serious about his running, and he deeply resented the contempt he encountered on all three counts while being educated among more privileged members of the English elite. Liddell was a devoutly religious Scot, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, played rugby for Scotland and would spend the last 20 years of his life as a Christian missionary in China; and who withdrew from the Olympic
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This isn’t just a story about winning. It’s a story of sporting innocence
100m – his best event – on learning the heats would be run on a Sunday. All this is in the film. But with each character there are significant deviations.
Abrahams is shown becoming the first person ever to complete Trinity College’s ‘Great Court Run’. The challenge is to run the 339-metre flagstoned perimeter of the college’s grandest courtyard in the time it takes for the college clock to strike twelve (around 44.4 seconds). He never did this. It was Lord Burghley who did so, in 1927 (a feat not repeated until undergraduate Sam Dobin matched it in 2007). But the scene is a neat way of embodying two truths: that Abrahams was an athlete of rare talent and drive; and that he was educated in an environment of arcane, cloistered privilege in which those same exceptional qualities marked him out as slightly suspect.
With Liddell, the main deviation is a pivotal episode in which, as he boards the boat to France for the Olympics, he discovers that one of his 100m heats will be held on a Sunday. He is forced to choose between his beliefs – which hold competing on a Sunday to be ‘against God’s law’ – and his athletic dreams. His decision to withdraw almost breaks his heart, and provokes outrage from the British sporting establishment. The British Olympic Committee puts huge pressure on him to change his mind; even the Prince of Wales has a go at him. But Liddell stands firm. All this is true, but in reality, discovery, decision and pressure all took place several months earlier. By the time Liddell travelled to Paris, the dust had settled and a place had been found for him in the 400m. In the film, he gets that place at the last minute thanks to a heart-warming sporting gesture by Lord Lindsay.
These aren’t the only falsehoods perpetrated by the film-makers to make the story tug more directly at our heartstrings. The pre-Olympics head-to-head in which Liddell beats Abrahams over 100m, causing a crisis of confidence, is made up. The order of Abrahams’s Olympic races is misrepresented, too, so that his climactic triumph comes last. Does it matter? A little; but the real-life story had sunk so deeply into oblivion by 1980 that a few creative liberties were perhaps a price worth paying for its resurrection. Before Chariots of Fire, the true record of these men’s lives was preserved in unvisited archives. Now the facts are blurred, but millions remember their courage, dedication and defiance.
Winging it
THE FILM WAS SO SUCCESSFUL it’s easy to forget how touch-and-go its making often was. Finance proved so hard to raise that the project was nearly abandoned, only to be saved by a last-minute cash injection from the Fayed family (Dodi Fayed is listed in the credits). Then there was the problem of the Cambridge college authorities, who at the last minute withdrew their permission for filming, after realising their predecessors would be portrayed as anti-semitic snobs.
The Old Etonian director, Hugh Hudson, fell back on the Old School Tie and the Old Pals Act, and much of the film was shot at Eton. This undermined the point of hiring lots of self-satisfied Cambridge students as extras, but I suppose we were quite good at projecting floppy-haired complacency in either environment.
You would need weapons-grade facial-recognition technology to spot my face in the film. In most cases I can’t even tell if it’s me, and my attempt at being a running extra was so inept that I think the whole race was dropped. •
In most respects, however, the film was blessed by the talent, commitment and suitability of those involved in its making. From the moment David Puttnam stumbled upon Eric Liddell’s story in an American sporting reference book, and then turned up Harold Abrahams’ story in an English one, crucial things kept going right.
Colin Welland was an inspired choice to write the screenplay. His research unearthed dozens of eye witnesses and eye-witness accounts. He found a stash of letters from Aubrey Montague that he used verbatim in the film; he attended the 1978 memorial service for Harold Abrahams that features at the film’s beginning and end; and he threw in inspired embellishments, such as the business with Lord Lindsay’s champagne glasses.
Ian Charleson, spotted in a stage role, had heard of the project and was as convinced as Puttnam and Hudson were that he was perfect for Liddell. (He was.)
Merseyside’s fading grandeur turned out to be a passable and affordable substitute for Paris, and just enough members of the local public were tempted to the Wirral’s old Bebington Oval to make a convincing crowd in the recreation of the Olympic stadium. Meanwhile, established actors were tempted into supporting roles – John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as the pompous college Masters, Ian Holm as Sam Mussabini – and embraced them so enthusiastically that they almost stole the show. As for the young unknowns – Charleson, Cross and Havers, plus Nicholas Farrell and Daniel Gerroll as Montague and Stallard respectively – their inexperience and ambition were just what the film needed. The on-screen athleticism was an act; the youthful hunger to achieve something unforgettable was the real thing.
Then there was the soundtrack, whose theme, composed by Vangelis, was so fundamental to the atmosphere that Hudson described it as ‘almost like another character’. It wasn’t even the theme Puttnam and Hudson had asked for. (They’d wanted an existing Vangelis tune, which would be used in the 1982 drama The
Year of Living Dangerously.) But Vangelis insisted on playing it to them, and the moment they heard it they realised it was a gamechanger. Vangelis said it was inspired by his father, a serious amateur sprinter. You can feel the authenticity; and if there is any sense in your soul of the exhilaration of running, this music will awaken it. Without Vangelis, the film might have been no more than a polished
Without Vangelis, the film might have been no more than a polished period piece
period piece: Brideshead Revisited with cinder tracks. The soundtrack gave everything else wings.
Power and glory
WATCHING THE FILM again today, I am sometimes distracted by the haziness of my memory. Was I in that scene or not? If so, where was it shot? But it is still surprisingly easy to get caught up in the narrative tug, and the pivotal scenes remain startlingly powerful.
What I notice now is where their power comes from. It’s not about the running: in the key moments, there isn’t any. Nor is it the script: there are barely any words. Instead, these scenes are loaded with stillness, tension and what feels like – but isn’t – hypnotic silence.
When Liddell, face wet with spray, gazes out over the English Channel, wrestling with his conscience on the deck of the boat taking him to France – or when Abrahams and his rivals crouch on the starting line of the 100m final, with Abrahams’ world reduced to the ‘corridor’ of the track ahead, ‘four foot wide, with 10 lonely seconds to justify my whole existence’ – what grips us is a sense of time standing still. Nothing happens. Each scene depicts a man, motionless. Yet the stillness draws us into their moment, allowing us to share both the pressure and the oppressive loneliness of the short-distance runner.
Much of this power comes from the artful visual composition, and the way the camera lingers on small, telling details: the trowels with which sprinters dig holes for their feet in the cinder track; Abrahams’ necklace – a good luck gift from Mussabini – swaying like a pendulum. But the intensity comes mainly from the music, which teases us with haunting echoes and unresolved tensions until we feel that we, too, are experiencing the heroes’ struggles. And that, I suppose, is as good a moment as any to mention ‘my’ Oscar.
The one part of the film in which I can recognise my contribution is the soundtrack. My moment is a tiny one, about 30 minutes in, in an episode highlighting Abrahams’ real-life love of Gilbert and Sullivan light operas. For a couple of minutes you can hear me singing in the chorus of ‘He is an Englishman’ and for a few seconds you can even see me on stage with
Abrahams as he performs in
HMS Pinafore.
It isn’t the musical highlight of the film. It may be the opposite. But the rules for the Academy Awards do say that short passages of pre-existing music may be considered in submissions for the Best Original Score award, so it’s theoretically possible that they considered this one along with the rest of the soundtrack.
On that threadbare argument I have for many years been basing my claim to be a partial Oscar-winner. The film-makers gave Harold Abrahams the credit for Lord Burghley’s Great Court Run; why shouldn’t I claim some of the credit for Vangelis’ Academy Award? OK, it’s a fatuous suggestion, the kind that only an overeducated clever clogs would think of making. But I suppose at heart that’s what I still am. I do, however, feel embarrassed about it now. I enjoyed joking with my children about ‘my’ Oscar when I introduced them to the film, and somehow it settled in to our stock of family gags. But now I am ashamed at how disrespectful I must once have been towards those who really did win Oscars, through their passion, dedication and creativity. Huge amounts of all these helped make Chariots of Fire the triumph it was. None came from me.
I realise now what a privilege it was to be involved with the film, even peripherally. But I didn’t appreciate it at the time, any more than I properly appreciated how lucky I was to be a Cambridge student, or how much my life at university – gowned, cloistered and grotesquely advantaged – resembled the lives of Abrahams and his chums 60 years earlier. For all my supposed academic brainpower, I barely even knew I was born.
I am less complacent now. But what can you do about the way you were 40 years ago? It’s not like a based-on-the-truth film, where you can rewrite the past to make the story what you want it to be. I was what I was; and sometimes, when I remember the details, I feel bad. When that happens, I often go for a run to feel better. That has been my go-to strategy for self-loathing for decades now. It usually works; and that’s a major reason why I feel so fortunate to have been a runner for much of my adult life. But it has only now occurred to me that the first time I tentatively embraced this life-changing, sanity-saving habit was in the summer of 1981; that is, within a few weeks of watching Chariots of Fire. With a prize like that, perhaps I never needed an Oscar.