Great article here. Bit long, but worth a read...
Two inspirational sprinters - one battling against bigotry, the other spurred by his religious beliefs, took the 1924 Olympics by storm, returning with gold. By Alasdair Reid, Sunday Times
It was even hotter than usual in Paris during the summer of 1924. Day after sweltering day, the sun rose high into the clear blue sky, while the city baked below. As the Olympic Games unfolded at the Stade Col-ombes, the temperature regularly soared past 100F, which ravaged the fields in the distance events. In the 10,000m cross-country, only 23 of the 38 starters made it to the finish.
The weather was never going to affect the sprinters as badly. They could look forward to perfect conditions for their explosive events. When they arrived at the stadium for the 100m heats on the morning of July 5, they had nothing to fear.
And neither had Eric Liddell. Away from the track, in the cool sanctuary of a Scots kirk in the city, he was at peace with himself and his God as he delivered a sermon. Months earlier, in an act that astonished the British athletics establishment and which, almost 60 years later, became the subject of the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, he had said he would not participate in the 100m as its scheduling would require him to break the Sabbath.
The subject of his sermon that day is unknown. In the film, Liddell is shown reading from the Isaiah. "Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall," he says. "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint."
AT THE track, a few kilometres away, Harold Abrahams was also relaxed. As the son of a Lithuanian Jew, running on a Sunday was no breach of religious principle for the Cambridge University student who had dominated English sprinting over the previous three years. His best times in the run-up to the Games were still well short of those set by Charles Paddock of the United States, the reigning Olympic champion and world record-holder, but Abrahams had strong confidence in himself.
Sam Mussabini, the professional coach hired by Abrahams, had developed the runner's technique to a fine art. His stride had been shortened and he had lowered his arm action, putting more poise into his running. He had acquired a more powerful start and learnt to concentrate on his dip at the finish. Liddell's withdrawal had established him as Britain's best hope for gold in the Games's blue-riband event.
Abrahams was a consummate technician. And even if he lacked Liddell's overt piety, he was no less a driven man. Elimination in the second round of the 100m at the Antwerp Games four years earlier was a failure that had festered inside him. He later confirmed that he was also spurred on by the increase in anti-Semitism in England at the time.
As he sat by the track that day, Abrahams kept a short note from Mussabini in his pocket. Its advice was terse and clinical. "Only think of two things," it said, "the report of the pistol and the tape. When you hear the one, just run like hell until you break the other."
Abrahams followed his coach's advice to the letter. In his heat, he set the fastest qualifying time and, after successfully negotiating his quarter- and semi-finals, he lined up for the final, having replaced Paddock as favourite. Again, he ran like hell, condensing his inner will and indignation into pure speed as he ran the race of his life. He broke the tape in 10.6sec, an Olympic record, to take the gold medal.
LIDDELL watched from the stand as Abrahams triumphed. No Briton had ever won the Olympic 100m, but his religious convictions admitted no pangs of envy into his reaction to Abrahams's victory. Liddell was, arguably, the pre-eminent sprinter of the age, but the evidence of many witnesses denies any suggestion that he felt he'd been deprived of an achievement that was rightfully his.
The film version conveys that outlook well enough, but employs licence in other areas. Far from learning only a few days earlier that the 100m heats were to be held on a Sunday, as Chariots of Fire suggests, both Liddell and the team's officials had known months beforehand that he would not be able to take part. He did not withdraw from the event, for the simple reason that he had never been entered for it in the first place.
Instead, he had trained for the 200m and 400m races. A regular winner at the shorter of those distances, Liddell's unorthodox style, which Ian Charleson, who played him in Chariots of Fire, had considerable difficulty trying to emulate, suggested he was ill-suited for the more disciplined pace of the longer event, despite his having the obvious stamina of somebody who had been capped seven times for Scotland at rugby. As he ran, his arms would flail with no obvious rhythm and he would throw his head back to an almost unnatural angle. It was, as one observer noted, as though he was looking to heaven for inspiration.
Whatever the doubts surrounding his suitability for the event, Liddell could draw on more than faith as he prepared for the 400m. A year earlier, he had taken part in a triangular contest between Scotland, England and Ireland at Stoke-on-Trent, competing in the 100, 220 and 440-yard events. Having won the two shorter sprints at the AAA championships at Stamford Bridge the previous weekend, it was no surprise when he repeated the achievements at Stoke. His performance in the 440, however, was astonishing.
There were no fixed lanes for quarter-mile races then, and runners would jostle for position once they were under way. Scarcely had the gun gone off, though, than Liddell found himself bunched among other athletes and he was knocked to the ground in the melee. As he rolled onto the infield, he heard a cry of "Foul!" from a judge, and momentarily assumed he had been disqualified.
But another track marshal urged him to continue. Hesitantly, he got back to his feet and started to run again. The field was 30 yards in front of him as he picked up his stride. To all intents and purposes, the race was lost. But gradually Liddell gained on the pack and, as he surged down the finishing straight, he picked off his opponents one by one, before collapsing over the line, having won by three yards.
The following day, the report in The Scotsman said: "The circumstances in which he won made it a performance bordering on the miraculous." The modest Scot would probably have balked at such praise, although he could hardly deny the suggestion that miracles can sometimes happen.
Liddell and Abrahams had both been entered for the 200m in Paris and both cruised through their heats, held the day after Abrahams's victory in the 100m. With that win behind him, Abrahams was a clear favourite to secure the sprint double, but he struggled in his semi-final on the Wednesday, finishing third, and only just scraped through. Liddell was more at ease in his semi, taking second place behind Paddock.
The United States had dominated sprinting through the early years of the century and their athletes had come to Paris in a confident, even jingoistic mood. Abrahams's win in the 100m had stung them, and they felt the 200m gave them the opportunity for revenge. In the furnace-like stadium the six-strong field was set, with Liddell and Abrahams against four Americans.
Liddell was in lane five and Abrahams in two. But both started badly, trailing in fifth and sixth places as Paddock sped off into the lead. Paddock faded around midway, but Jackson Scholz, the 100m silver medallist, took up where his countryman had left off, winning in a time of 21.6sec, an Olympic record. Liddell's strong finish earned him a consolation bronze; Abrahams, who finished last, later described his performance as "running like a selling plater".
It is a lasting irony that Liddell is remembered primarily for the race he did not run in Paris, rather than the two events in which he did compete. Perhaps that situation would have changed if he had gone on to fulfil his potential in subsequent years, but he had already arranged to serve as a missionary in China in 1925. Less than a year after his triumphs in Paris, and still only 23 years old, he turned his back on the sport for ever.
But he did so with a gold medal to his name. For all the doubts that surrounded his ability at 400m, Liddell dominated the event completely. It is a matter of speculation whether his self-denial over the 100m added to the incentive behind his victory, but there is no doubt whatsoever that it was one of the greatest track performances in history.
It began quietly. Early on Thursday afternoon, Liddell came through his first heat in a conservative time of 50.2sec, before coasting to victory in his quarter-final in 49 seconds dead later that day. The following morning, he went faster again, winning his semi-final in 48.2sec, but his progress was cast into the shade by Horatio Fitch, the American who won his semi in an Olympic record time of 47.8sec.
Like Abrahams a few days earlier, Liddell clutched a note as he made his way to the stadium for the final. It had been signed by members of the British team and was handed to him, at the team hotel in Rue de la République, by the masseur who had attended him throughout the Games. "He that honours me, I will honour," it said, a slight misquotation of a passage from the Book of Samuel.
"Them that honour me, I will honour," it should have read. But Liddell was no more pernickety in his faith than he was in his running style.
His experience in Stoke made him glad that the final was to be run in lanes, but the fact that he had been drawn in the outside lane meant he could follow only one plan. "The secret of my success over the 400m is that I run the first 200 as hard as I can," he said later. "Then, for the second 200, with God's help, I run harder."
Which was just what he did. At the race's mid-point, Liddell was clocked at 22.2sec, a time that would have been admirable in a 200m event, to put himself three metres clear of Guy Butler, his fellow Briton. It seemed inconceivable that he could hold the same pace to the fin-ish but, although he slowed slightly, he was still comfortably ahead at the end. Butler finished third, Fitch second, with Liddell breaking the tape five metres clear in 47.6sec, an Olympic and European record.
THE Scotsman was fêted on his return to Britain. A week later, when he graduated in science from Edinburgh University, he was carried aloft from the ceremony by his fellow students. The following year, he moved to China, where he died of a brain tumour in 1945, spending his last days as a prisoner of the occupying Japanese army.
"Eric always displayed the greatest courage," said Abrahams, who went on to work as a respected athletics writer and administrator until his death in 1978. "He will be remembered as one of the finest sportsmen who ever donned the running shoe."
In 1991, more than 40 years after he died and a decade after his life was immortalised on celluloid, a small headstone was unveiled at Liddell's previously unmarked grave in China's Tientsin province. An appropriate text, just a few simple words taken from Isaiah, formed the inscription: "They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary."