The Flying Scotsman

On a fiercely hot 11th of July 1924, the event that took the Paris Olympics by storm was the astonishing gold medal run by sprinter Eric Liddell. On that day, against the odds, ‘The Flying Scotsman’ as he was known, fully embodied the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” He had copped a wave of criticism at home when he declined running in his favoured 100m event because it was scheduled on a Sunday, which for him was set aside for God.
 
He was transformed into a larger-than-life hero when, given an alternative to run in his less favoured 400m, he won by seven metres in world record time. Over the following century this unlikely story of muscular Christianity has grown in the telling, impacting people of every kind all over the world.
 
Now in 2024, as the multi-billion-dollar international sporting extravaganza opens in the ‘City of Love’, it’s remarkable that the most enduring image from the 1924 Games is that of Eric, head thrown back, blitzing the field, proving on a cinder race track that principle mattered more than patriotism. 

In 1981, Chariots of Fire - David Puttnam’s film version of Eric’s Olympic drama - was taking box-offices worldwide by storm. In the studio of Outback Radio 2WEB at Bourke, I recorded a telephone interview with a rugby coach who had worked closely with the actors on the athletics scenes. One moment has stayed with me. This man, who professed to have no religion, said quite soberly, “If there’s one person I could choose to be, without a doubt it would be Eric Liddell!” He explained it was not so much Eric’s athleticism or the fact that he’d been capped to play Rugby seven times for Scotland as a winger, but his depth of character.
 
That sentiment has been repeated a thousand times over.
 
The urgency that gripped film producer David Puttnam to tell this story fifty years after the event was the spiritual element. It was captured in a script-line someone nominated as a medal contender for the best in sports movie history. Eric says to his sister Jenny, “I believe that God made me for a purpose, for China, but  he also made me fast and when I run, I feel his pleasure!”
 
Puttnam admitted that crafting the story of Eric’s courageous stand for his beliefs changed him profoundly. In the years that followed, what remained most significant for him was not the film’s 4 Academy Awards, but the steady flow of letters from people telling him that the hope it generated had turned them from suicide.
 
Sculptor Lesley Pover, was moved to capture the way Eric’s passion for running was inextricably bound up with his passion for God. At the time, his glorious Olympic 400m run was lauded as the greatest quarter mile ever. When he was asked his secret he smiled and replied, “I run the first 200m as fast as I can and then God helps me to run the second even faster!”
 
She asked a schoolboy runner to emulate Eric’s unique head-thrown-back finishing style.  “The youth told me it was a truly terrifying sensation, to have suddenly lost sight of your goal, but yet to believe and trust that you would be taken there … There was for me in his physical gesture of throwing his head back and reaching his arm upwards in an…ecstasy of surrender, an echo of Christ.”
 
True to his call, Eric walked away from his brilliant athletic career to return to China, the land of his birth and early childhood, to serve the next twenty years there as a high school teacher. In 1945, his race ended in the obscurity of a Japanese prison camp, where eighteen hundred Westerners were herded into a compound in shocking conditions. An inoperable brain tumour killed him, far from the ecstatic applause that had met him in the Olympic arena.
 
But the deliberate effort by his captors to dehumanise and humiliate had provoked an emaciated Eric to go faster, higher and stronger. After extensive research, his biographer concluded, “In a camp rife with criticism and back-biting and gossip, there was no-one who had a bad word to say about him.” He expended himself tirelessly for others.
 
A nineteen-year-old American internee told of the qualities that caused one girl to describe Uncle Eric as ‘Jesus in running shoes.’ “Often I would see him bent over a chessboard or a model boat or directing some sort of square dance – absorbed, weary and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the imagination of penned-up youths…He was overflowing with good humour and love for life, with enthusiasm and charm.” 
 
In Scotland in 2002, Eric topped the public vote for the most popular sporting hero the country had ever produced.  In 2022, on the centenary of his first international cap against France, he was inducted into the Scottish Rugby Hall of Fame. His courageous faith remains the constant inspiration for books, blogs, plays and sermons world-wide.
 
But the most startling honours came from Communist China, where only statues of Chairman Mao had been allowed. In 1988, a monument made from granite from the island of Mull in his native Scotland was erected at the site of his grave in the former prison camp at Weifang. On it were inscribed the words of the prophet Isaiah, “They will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
 
In this Olympic year, a statue of Eric in full stride was erected alongside, proclaiming him China’s first Olympic Champion. The Director of the Tianjin Sports Museum said that regardless of how Liddell’s identity and environment changed, he remained consistent at heart, practising his simple beliefs and pursuing the meaning of life. He noted that the spirit and strength transcend time and space, inspiring people.
 
I proved that true in my own family. A couple of years ago, I gave Eric’s biography Something Greater Than Gold to my teenage grandson. When I asked him today how it impacted him, he paused and said, “He loved running, but he loved people and God more.”
 
Eric Liddell always shunned talk of his Olympic success. It makes you wonder whether, at this flaunting 2024 Games, there is a humble athlete from a country with minimal resources, who will leave a legacy like his, which will be cherished in a hundred years.