How Frank's squad to do with inspiration like this

THE HERALD REPORTS


Spirited life in the fast lane races off the page

DOUG GILLON, Athletics Correspondent February 15 2008

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As sports days go, it was among the more unusual and least publicised, even though it was the final athletics contest in the career of an iconic Olympic champion.

There was a cheering captive audience, but it was far removed from Colombes where Eric Liddell had won Olympic 400 metres gold in Paris in 1924. The scene was a Japanese internment camp during World War II, in China, and Liddell was by then in his early 40s. He had sent his pregnant wife and two children to safety in Canada, and was never to see them again. He died in 1945. An autopsy revealed an inoperable brain tumour.

Eric wrote a letter to his wife hours before he died. She received it some two and half months later, two days after finally learning of his death. His daughter, Patricia, recalls winning her first race at school that very day, and returning, jubilant, to a house in mourning. She last saw her dad on the quayside aged six, as his ship sailed from China.

Patricia recently told The Herald that Eric had turned down a chance of repatriation, giving his place to an expectant mother. Chinese officials at Weishien met British Olympic Association performance director Sir Clive Woodward last year as he laid a wreath on Liddell's grave. They told him Sir Winston Churchill had also tried to negotiate Liddell's release. This claim was passed on to us by BOA chief executive Simon Clegg, and is now being investigated.

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At the camp in the northern province of Shandong there was a handicap for veterans: "middle-aged runners, weakened by the rigours and poor food of camp life" according to eye witness David Michell, to whom Liddell became a surrogate father. By then in his early 40s, Liddell was back-marker.

Some spectators claimed he had too much ground to make up, that Liddell could not do it. "He will. Just wait," hissed Michell who later recalled yet another victory: "We basked in the aura of Olympic glory as - cheering, chanting, chattering - we surrounded our hero."

Michell became a minister, and when interviewed by this paper some 15 years ago, opened a window on a subsequent Liddell life, one far more worthy of a film than that portrayed in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire.

But Michell is only one source drawn upon by John Keddie in Running The Race, the latest biography of a man for whom the adjective "remarkable" is wholly inadequate. It uniquely documents every race he ran, and links his international sports career in athletics and rugby (seven caps for Scotland) with his Christian witness.

Keddie is particularly qualified to do so. I first met him in the mid 1960s. He was national junior triple jump champion and a schoolboy internationalist, and his father, a freelance journalist, was kind enough to report my own modest athletics efforts.

John was already a professing Christian, and later abandoned a career in accountancy and commercial management in London to study for the ministry. He has held a charge in the Scottish Presbyterian Church since 1987, and is currently pastor at Bracadale on Skye.

His own athletics roots, like Liddell's, were in Edinburgh. Liddell ran his first 440 yards race on the university's Craiglockhart track in 1922, clocking 52.6 seconds. The pavilion and grass track were unchanged 44 years later, almost to the day, when Keddie won a club contest there in identical time. Though Keddie was later to write a centenary history of Scottish track and field, Liddell's faith made a greater impact on him than his racing. Like him, Keddie declined to run on Sundays.

Later, he advised screen writer Colin Welland who significantly fictionalised much of Chariots. A character is named in Keddie's honour in celluloid. Colonel Keddie, president of the Scottish governing body, is in a scene where Liddell falls in a relay, and gets up to win. He did, indeed do this, but during an individual 440 yards at Stoke in 1923.

His only two previous such individual outings had been at Edinburgh University Sports. In the triangular match at Stoke he made history, the only man to win the 100, 220 and 440 in the meeting's history. In the 440 he was knocked on to the infield, reckoned to be 20 yards adrift before regaining the track. There's little doubt that this victory, by two yards in 51.2, was worth under 49 seconds. It was hailed as one of the greatest track performances ever seen, and was the first real clue to Liddell's one-lap prowess.

Yet relays apart, Liddell had run the 440 yards (metric equivalent of 400m) only thrice before the Olympic season. In 1924 he had five races at 440, including heats, to win the Scottish and AAA titles (three rounds), but when he lined up in heat 14 of the 400 metres at the Olympics in Paris he had never raced that distance before in his life.

Liddell had ruled himself out of the 100m and both the 4 x100 and 4x400m relays, because each involved rounds on Sundays.

The British Olympic Association tried to have the programme changed - some-thing to which the IOC might well have acceded today - and the argument was made to Liddell that the continental Sabbath ended at noon. All in vain. Contemporary historian David Jamieson said Liddell had responded that for him, "Sunday lasted all day".

Liddell abandoned rugby for the 1923-24 season, to avoid injury, but also to focus on his BSc finals.

As his widow, Florence, later said, his Sabbatarian principles were responsible for him discovering his 400m ability: "Eric always said that the great thing for him was that when he stood by his principles . . . he found that the 400m was really his race. He said he would never have known that otherwise. He would never have dreamed of trying to run the 400m at the Olympics."

He might still have had designs on the 100 metres, but his fourth place in the 100 yards at the Penn Relays in spring 1924 surely put those prospects in perspective.

Liddell's 200m bronze in Paris (which came first) was largely overshadowed, even though the Scot beat England's Olympic 100m winner Harold Abrahams.

Liddell went to China in 1925, forsaking seductive sporting adulation for the arduous life of a missionary, and teaching maths and athletics. This did not end his athletics. He kept in shape and in 1928 beat French and Japanese Olympians over 200 and 400m in China.

There were two races against Dr Otto Peltzer, the German world 800m record-holder. He beat Peltzer at 400, and narrowly lost at 800. Liddell's time in the latter, 2:03.1, prompted Peltzer to say that, "if he trained, he could be the greatest man in the world at that distance."

Peltzer also spent four years of war in a German internment camp, having been outed as a homosexual. After the war he coached athletics in India.

Yesterday Keddie was signing copies of the biography in Edinburgh, and last night made a two-hour presentation at the Liddell Centre in Edinburgh. It is inescapable that Liddell is still touching and influencing lives.

The book is an outstanding tribute, a model of research, and a fascinatingly credible insight on the man. There is little doubt that the personna of Liddell, as depicted in Chariots of Fire, is that painted for Welland by Keddie.

The fiction of that film, which won five Oscars, was described in its day as "a fragment of history trapped in amber."

Keddie rightly observes that this might equally apply to Liddell's life. One in which his God always came first, and sport second.


Running the Race, by John W Keddie, published by Evangelical Press, £8.95

This article was posted on 15-Feb-2008, 08:14 by Hugh Barrow.