The textbooks said that Liddell was physically unsuited for the 400 metres. According to the coaching experts, the stamina and speed needed for it could only be produced from a slim, spare build. The runner had to be at least 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet tall and not too heavy around the shoulders. The body had to be well balanced and the body-angle for one lap was reckoned to be a slight, forward inclination of the trunk from the waist. The step had to be lithe and springy. Liddell ticked none of those boxes. Only McKerchar and Binks sensed that he possessed the staying power to equal his sprinter’s thrust.
Liddell was a greenhorn beyond 220 yards. In 1921 he’d competed over 300 yards at Ibrox, finishing third. In 1922, at Craiglockhart, he’d won a 440-yard event during the Edinburgh University Athletic Club Annual Games in 52.6 seconds. In 1923, again at Craiglockhart, he’d taken first place in another 440-yard contest, though his time was 0.2 of a second slower than before. Only Liddell’s sensational comeback at Stoke suggested he could conquer the distance. McKerchar was unperturbed. The sole target was peak performance in Paris; nothing else mattered. Every appearance for Liddell now, whether as a student or as an athlete of the AAA’s, was geared towards that fortnight in July. Times were insignificant to McKerchar, who was canny enough to know that there was a psychological advantage to be gained from holding back the cards of a winning hand. If Liddell built up his strength, he’d be ready for Paris and be capable of winning there.
Through his Cambridge connection, Liddell was invited to guest for the Achilles Club in the University of Pennsylvania Relays at the end of April 1924.4 The trip cost him £28. The BOA looked unfavourably on it, believing a transatlantic passage at the start of the season would disturb his Olympic build-up. Liddell, disagreeing, explained to Binks: ‘I have studied myself every way and I know how I can get fit to produce my best form.’ Recognizing the brotherhood that had formed between Liddell and the Cambridge set, Binks made an equally valid point about his keenness to travel. ‘He wishes to go with his Varsity chums,’ he said. The Achilles team included Douglas Lowe, David Burghley and Arthur Marshall.
The bare details make the journey seem horrendous.5 It was as if, like the Ancient Mariner, Liddell had shot an albatross at sea and been cursed. He lost one suitcase going out and another coming back. The first crossing was rough, making him badly seasick. Still queasy when the competition began, Liddell was an inadequate fourth in the 100 yards and second in the 220 yards.6 The Athletic News and Cyclists Journal reported the Americans’ dismal opinion of him. Its Olympic coaches saw nothing to fear – ‘unless he promptly corrects his mechanical faults’, said the newspaper. Among journalists, Binks was isolated in his opinion that Liddell would win the 400 metres. ‘In my day the more I was told I didn’t have a chance, the more I would go out of my way to do something extra,’ he wrote. He was convinced Liddell possessed that ‘something extra’ too.
Those runs in Pennsylvania, so feeble on paper, were part of a broader strategy. Liddell had told Binks that ‘if I should get beaten it will be an ordinary event’; and this is how he subsequently saw it. ‘I merely regarded it as an incident in my preparation for Paris,’ he said. Liddell thought he ‘ran well enough’ anyway, despite never finding his ‘land legs’ in America. He was obeying McKerchar’s instructions. Before sailing, Liddell said his coach was ‘careful to insist anyway that I should not overdo things in order that I should be perfectly fit three months later’.7
There were social consolations too. On the ship home Liddell met two sisters called Freddie and Edith, colourfully different from the conservatively attired and conservatively spoken Eileen Soper.8 The ‘girls’, as Arthur Marshall called them, were travelling to ‘do Europe’. In cloche hats and sleeveless dresses, long strings of pearls around their necks, Freddie and Edith were the epitome of Jazz Age fashion, flaunting underarm hair as a matter of rebellion. Their skin was pale, which accentuated the kohl-black eyeliner each wore and their equally black, fashionably bobbed hair. ‘They said they were going to be in Paris for the Olympic Games,’ remembered Marshall, ‘and we said if we were there at the same time we hoped we could meet.’
Liddell came home motivated by a quotation he’d seen displayed at the University of Pennsylvania. On several occasions Philip Noel-Baker had recited it to him at Cambridge. ‘In the dust of defeat as well as in the laurels of victory there is a glory to be found if one has done his best.’ Previously he had referred to a more familiar saying as ‘my motto’.9 It was embroidered on white cloth and modestly framed and hung in countless homes: ‘If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.’ The University of Pennsylvania sentence had more poetic power. With the Olympics so near, the words resonated with Liddell. Even if defeat awaited him in Paris, he would accept it and recognize the ‘glory’ of losing honourably, he said. ‘Those words expressed everything about the true spirit of competition. I thought about them often as the weeks went by.’
The British Olympic Association continued to act as though Eric Liddell was about to capitulate over Sunday competition. The minutes of its meeting dated 27 May – less than six weeks before the opening ceremony – included him in the team for the 100 metres rather than the 400 metres, ignoring his wishes. Before that month blew out, the BOA accepted it had all along indulged in wishful thinking.
On May’s final weekend Liddell ran his first serious 440-yard race for a year – only the fourth of his career. The morning before McKerchar had asked to meet him at a deserted Craiglockhart, where the event was held. The two of them strolled around the full circuit of the track. As he walked the straights and bends McKerchar gave a commentary, passing on insights about how the race ought to be tackled. ‘He plotted out the vital stages, telling me exactly how to run each part; and, doing so, I was able to win,’10 said Liddell. Without over-exerting himself, he registered a respectable 51.5 seconds.
Unlike Sam Mussabini, who could overcomplicate running, McKerchar didn’t involve himself in fancy theories. His approach before Paris was plain and direct. ‘Always, when running the quarter, I used the same method,’ said Liddell, again crediting McKerchar for it.11 ‘It was the same method every “sprint” quarter-miler usually runs: the first hundred yards almost, if not quite, “all out”. The back stretch at well over three-quarter pace. The next bend, which one takes as the slowest part of the journey. The last hundred as a sprint.’
Liddell was taught something else by McKerchar, which he described like this: ‘Slowness in becoming perfectly fit is always a help [and] a little each day is better than a lot in one day.’12 Liddell went to Powderhall twice a week and once to Craiglockhart. He did road-work on his own and occasionally sprinted on the lawns of the George Square gardens, which were surrounded by black rails and accessible through a gate almost directly opposite his front door. Liddell enticed his housemates to run against him, amid the flowers and trees, and gave them his old international rugby shirts to wear. He said he allowed them a ‘good five paces handicap grace’ to make it more competitive and then announced the start himself. About fifteen strides from the finish, he’d shoot past them.
Throughout late spring and early summer, Liddell said McKerchar was ‘handling me beautifully’,13 which made it sound as if his trainer was at the wheel of a Model T Ford. ‘I was coming along steadily all the time,’ he went on. His performances proved it. In the Scottish Championships in mid-June Liddell won the 100 yards in 10 seconds, the 220 yards in 23.2 seconds and the 440 yards in 51.2 seconds. ‘My first ever clean sweep there,’ he said. In the AAA Championships, staged at Stamford Bridge a week later, he won the 220 yards in 22 seconds and the 440 yards in 49.6 seconds, a personal best. Those championships were held in the shadow of Liddell’s punishing final exams for his Bachelor of Science degree. In splitting track-time with intense book-work, Liddell admitted that he was not ‘absolutely at my top’ athletically.
There was a minor blip in the build-up to Paris. A few weeks before the Olympics, one of his housemates got into what he ca
lled a ‘friendly tussle’14 with Liddell. He put a judo leg-hold on his right knee. In breaking free from it, Liddell strained his thigh. ‘I learned what it is to be thoroughly unpopular,’ said the housemate, who experienced ‘immense relief’ when Liddell recovered. Liddell was more concerned about whether academic stress had weakened him for the Olympics. Only in Paris did he realize that swotting up for his degree was ‘not such a misfortune as I had first imagined’.15 Commitment to his studies meant he hadn’t over-trained. His mind was relaxed for running because it had concentrated on essays and exam papers rather than races.
No British athlete, not even Harold Abrahams, was in better shape than Eric Liddell.
Either of two twenty-three-year-old Americans appeared a copper-bottom certainty to win the 400 metres nonetheless. The first was Coard Taylor, a Princeton student. The second was Horatio Fitch, a name so wonderful that Dickens could have invented it. His team mates simply called him ‘Ray’. He’d studied at the University of Illinois and then become an engineer.
In the ivy-covered Harvard Stadium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the US Olympic trials, the lean, blond Taylor set a world record of 48.1 seconds. And Fitch, who ran in dark-framed glasses, was just 0.3 of a second behind him. These times were set in teeming rain too. Everyone expected Paris to turn into a private duel between Taylor and Fitch.
In America, Liddell’s name had ceased to be taken seriously.
No Olympics had ever found itself at the epicentre of a carnival, which is what Paris had become. It had been the fin de siècle spot of the world – the capital of the free spirit and the sybarite. Consequently the marriage of event to place was treated like the rarest alignment of two planets. Paris sparkled, artistically and fashionably, and there was an obsessive compulsion to be part of it. Anybody who was already somebody – as well as those who aspired to make the acquisition of fame their life’s work – made a beeline for it. Libertine attitudes made the place attractive. So did an exchange rate in which one dollar was worth more than 25 francs and one pound was worth up to three times more than that. The creative world packed its baggage and went to speak French. No one wanted to miss the party – especially Americans thirsty during prohibition. It was heady, gaudy and decadent, the craving for a good time never satisfied. Every joint jumped to the sweet thunder of big-band brass, the thump of trad jazz or the ragtime four-four of the Charleston. The pavement cafés were choked with impecunious writers, poets, painters and pretend philosophers. Even New York and London seemed drably provincial in comparison. It appalled the strictly puritanical, such as the Lord’s Day Observance Society, which saw nothing but louche living, debauchery and drunkenness.
We all know Ernest Hemingway’s description of Paris as ‘a moveable feast’. The writer Gertrude Stein – Hemingway’s mentor and friend then – still put it best of all, saying: ‘It was where the twentieth century was.’
This modern, popular city was determined to host a modern, popular Olympics.
No one was further removed from the bright young thing and the anything-goes bohemian than Eric Liddell. And an easy, but horribly flawed, assumption was made about him because of his character. His expression of religious faith was perceived as a sign of innate weakness. Because of his decision not to compete on a Sunday, Liddell was dismissed as a pacifist in top competition – a man with a soft centre. The notion was ludicrous. Once, when pointedly asked how he won races so often against the odds, Liddell answered, ‘I don’t like to be beaten.’16 On the track Liddell knew where to find the opposition’s jugular – and he also knew how to rip it out.
Paris was a test of temperament for Liddell long before it became a test of speed, requiring qualities no one could coach: fortitude, integrity, forgiveness, stoicism, will. You either possessed these or you didn’t.
Britain took seventy-three track and field athletes to Paris. In the pocket-sized handbook given to each of them, Lord Cadogan wrote what was supposed to be the standard rah-rah message on behalf of King, country and the red-blotched map of Empire. ‘To play the game is the only thing that matters,’ he said. Cadogan wasn’t the sort of public speaker you would pay a nickel to hear; he tended to drone on a bit. But that single line stood out because the sentence came with a poisonous tip and the intended recipient was easy to trace. Cadogan’s choice of phrase was a snide attack on Eric Liddell. His Lordship knew that in Britain the term ‘playing the game’ was bound up with Victorian and Edwardian honour and patriotism, sportsmanship and fairness. Conscientious objection to Sunday sport wasn’t ‘playing the game’ as Cadogan saw it.
His loyal lieutenant, A. B. George, had already trashed Liddell’s chances of winning so much as a tin button in Paris. George saw no conflict of interest in continuing to write his comment-based columns. In his preview of the Games, published a week before the opening ceremony, George patronized Liddell cruelly. ‘Even late as it is, it may yet be possible for Eric Liddell to correct his fault at looking to the sky instead of to the track ten yards ahead,’ he wrote.17 ‘No wonder American critics found fault with his style. It is a pity he ignores the most ordinary rules of balance.’ The subliminal message contained in that paragraph needed no elucidation. As George saw it, Liddell was a lost cause, not to be taken seriously. George was disingenuous too. He knew it was impossible for Liddell to overhaul his approach to running inside seven days. Given the context of the piece, his ostensible expression of ‘pity’ reads like condescension, so poorly concealed as to make certain its true motive and meaning are glimpsed. George’s position as part motivator, part organizer and part general factotum of the British team ought to have been untenable after that. The BOA chose to ignore it.
A lot of men would have made Cadogan’s teeth look like a heap of broken crockery. A lot of others would have confronted George. Liddell looked at both of them with a tranquil eye.
Philip Noel-Baker was particularly supportive.18 Clutching a cup of tea in each hand, he regularly sought out Liddell for ‘a chinwag’. As a conduit between the top brass and the ranks, he was a mollifying presence. He didn’t consider Liddell’s stance to be detrimental to his character. Nor did he see it as a snub to Britain. His decision not to fight in the war meant Noel-Baker knew more than anyone else – even Liddell – about the courage necessary to go against the grain.
The rest of the Cambridge athletes wrapped themselves around him like a protective blanket too. He roomed with Douglas Lowe. He roamed the streets of Paris in the company of Arthur Marshall, who had travelled as a reserve. He trained with fellow 400 metres runner Guy Butler, who had most to lose from Liddell’s entry into his territory. We tend to admire those who admire us. So Liddell made a new companion, the cross-country runner John Benham, a sprite of a figure who became a cheerleader for his talents. Liddell also had the unflappable Tom McKerchar, who told him to ignore the distractions and concentrate on winning, which would muzzle his critics. McKerchar had gone to Paris knowing he was about to become a father for the thirteenth time. That baby could wait; he had to nursemaid Liddell first.
Liddell still had to overcome stabs of self-doubt.19 He was heard muttering them to himself. ‘I wonder if I’m doing the right thing?’ There was the shortest of pauses before he assertively answered his own question: ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ The witness who overheard Liddell’s dialogue with himself was Philip ‘Christie’ Christison, one of the team’s ‘assistant managers’, all of whom were gophers for George and those above him. An army captain, Christison was in charge of the 2nd King’s Own Cameron Highlanders, the musical accompaniment to Britain’s Olympic march. Christison was a war hero, winner of the Military Cross at Loos in 1915. He was then awarded a bar in 1917 for conspicuous gallantry. Among his principal functions was arranging transport to the Colombes Stadium. This was a daily trial of wits because dollar-rich Americans commandeered an armada of black cabs, monopolizing the ranks with the guarantee of a double fare. Sometimes Christison had to frantically flag down open-topped trucks or private cars to f
erry his stranded athletes. As a fellow Scot, he felt an association with Liddell and, after avidly following his career, wanted him to succeed. Christison tried to convey this. His good intentions led briefly to bad consequences only because he lacked two attributes: the finesse to compose his homage so it wouldn’t be misconstrued, and the nous to appreciate that Liddell was supersensitive to even the subtlest effort to manipulate him. Christison blundered in, telling Liddell how ‘sad it was’ that the 100 metres would go ahead without him. Liddell misinterpreted the sentiment of regret. He saw it as a Trojan horse, containing an army ready to argue with him. So he got his retaliation in first. ‘Don’t pressure me,’ he told Christison. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’
Liddell knew what Christison didn’t. He said he felt ‘cherry ripe’20 for the 400 metres, calling it ‘my pet event’. Even the circumstances that had forced him into it appeared pre-ordained now.
In retrospect, Paris was hailed as the first ‘modern Olympics’, a tag that seems half-preposterous to those of us who have grown up with the meretriciousness of the modern Games – a festival of advertising and commercial branding – and compare them to the black and white photographs and silent, scratchy film of 1924. The opening ceremony of today’s Olympics is an amalgam of concert and cabaret, bedazzling Broadway and ballet. The opening ceremony in Paris looks like amateur dramatics in the church hall.21 There are no lights in primary colours, no barrage of flash fireworks, no great blasts of music – except from a brass band – and no grand choreographed dances. In fact, there’s no hoopla at all. Everything in Paris is ordered and politely well mannered.
The flag bearers advance in a half-circle and gather in the grassy centre of the stadium. The Olympic oath is read. Trumpets are blown. Flocks of pigeons, rising like specks of ash, are released from wicker baskets. A cannon goes off, the faint wisps of its smoke lost in the glare of the day. The embroidered flag is run up the pole. The dignitaries – among them the President of France, the Prince of Wales, the Shah of Persia – sit stiffly, like mannequins. The lack of corporate uniformity strikes the eye too. The track perimeter is devoid of adverts. The athletes are devoid of sponsors’ logos. The Olympic rings, now everywhere at every Games, adorn only the flag.
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