There is a picture taken from an airship of Colombes Stadium which captures a near-pastoral scene around it. Trees in full foliage decorate the land. The wide Seine meanders westwards. The soft greenery of the countryside spreads towards the horizon, made fuzzy because of a heavy haze. Any artist would paint out what disfigures the serenity of the scene, which is a factory with four tall, spindly chimneys stuck on the river bank, each belching polluting fumes, and also the grim concrete oval of the stadium itself with its enormous square clock and 100-foot-long scoreboard.
During the parade of athletes Eric Liddell was jammed against the kerb of the track. A photographer caught him with his head turned towards the dignitaries, his straw boater laid formally across his chest.22
The newspapers still concentrated on Lowe, Stallard, Butler and Abrahams – particularly Abrahams. At breakfast the athletes went briskly through the thin pagination of those papers and read stories aloud to one another. Correspondents christened Abrahams ‘The Cambridge Cannonball’,23 the alliteration rolling nicely off the page. Abrahams responded to it. He had only two narrow squeaks in the 100 metres. In his opening heat he clocked 11 seconds, describing his movements as resembling ‘a dilapidated cab-horse’. In the second he sped up.24 It was as if he’d swallowed a whole jar of that Easton’s Syrup: he ran 10.6 seconds to equal the Olympic record. In the semi-finals, however, he was left on the start line. A yard behind after 10 metres, Abrahams heard a ‘small voice inside me’. It was crying, ‘Don’t panic,’ he said. At the halfway mark he was a stride down. At the three-quarter mark he was nearly level. At the end, through an adherence to technique, he was in front. An exchange with Abrahams afterwards convinced Liddell no one would catch him in the final either.25
LIDDELL: ‘You were badly off.’
ABRAHAMS: ‘Don’t talk about it. I saw five in front of me. But I won’t be left a second time.’
As Liddell put it: ‘There spoke the match-winning temperament. It was not boastfulness at all. It was the conviction of a man who realised our hopes rested on him and who intended to live up to them.’
So it proved.
In the final, Abrahams was at the apex of his dip before the tape snapped against him, billowing across his upper torso. His head and chest were thrust forward and his arms were straight back, almost level with his shoulder. In this pose he could have been one of those very early aviators who believed that man-powered flight was possible with a pair of cane wings. Abrahams looked as though he were about to take off from the edge of a cliff face. The silver medallist, the slim-shouldered American Jackson Scholz, fell and flailed across the finish. There was something of the dying swan at the Bolshoi about him. The stopwatch timed Abrahams at 10.6 seconds.
Liddell was pleased for Abrahams and also relieved for himself. If Abrahams had lost, Liddell expected more criticism. Because he had won, no one much cared that Liddell hadn’t. As far as the newspapers were concerned, he receded further into the middle distance. Abrahams was the show’s star, a British soloist.
Aware of the form of Coard Taylor and Horatio Fitch, A. B. George had claimed ‘Liddell’s main hope would seem to be the 200m’, reflecting his lack of confidence in a successful metamorphosis from sprinter to quarter-miler.26 George was essentially arguing that Liddell lacked the lung and leg power to stay with an international field over 200 metres, let alone 400 metres. Another reason was Liddell’s sluggishness out of the holes. ‘The papers now and then reminded me that my weak point was the slowness with which I started,’ said Liddell, accepting it self-consciously.27 The consensus was that Liddell wouldn’t beat Butler; and that Butler wouldn’t beat Taylor or Fitch. The smart money was still on one of them to dominate the field straightforwardly. Apparently, the Americans thought so too.
Fitch kept an Olympic diary, which he called ‘When You Get It Done’.28 Read between the lines of the early entries and you’ll detect that either through complacency-cum-arrogance or, more probably, from poor tactics and poorer preparation, the coach responsible for the 400 metres, Amos Alonzo Stagg, blundered. Having reached Paris, after eight days at sea, Fitch wrote about meeting Hollywood’s golden couple: Douglas Fairbanks, known for roles as a swordsman and swashbuckler in films such as The Mark of Zorro, The Thief of Bagdad and The Three Musketeers, and his wife Mary Pickford, regarded as ‘America’s Sweetheart’, her movies regularly grossing a million dollars. And, rather than a programme of constant training, he recorded the daily ‘pitching of horseshoes’ for recreation, the bowls of strawberries Stagg’s team ate ‘morning, noon and night’ and also a lot of sight-seeing, including a day at the Longchamp horse races. In the beginning the Americans hardly went near the track. Fitch had wanted to do some ‘over-distance’ work. He found the coach was ‘against it’. Known as ‘the Old Man’, the sixty-two-year-old ‘Lonnie’ Stagg was a gridiron guru and the sportsman’s sportsman: a football end at Yale and also an outstanding pitcher, who’d once turned down a contract with the New York Giants. Stagg had co-founded the American Football Coaches Association only two years before the Games. He saw no need to overtire his athletes, affectionately called ‘The Gang’. But at the outset of the competition Fitch didn’t consider himself ‘in shape’, blaming it on ‘poor eating, charging around Paris too much and insufficient hard work in training’.
Britain didn’t anticipate a medal because Butler, ranked above Liddell, was running with a handicap. He’d pulled a muscle in his thigh in mid-June and had walked on crutches until receiving ultra-intensive electrical treatment. He’d barely practised before the Olympics and used the heats ‘as training spins’. To avoid aggravating his injury, Butler decided to start his races from a standing position instead of from the holes, which put him at a further disadvantage.
Newspapers said that Liddell would be fortunate to finish fourth. A typical forecast appeared in the Sunday Chronicle.29 Reflecting on his decision to swap the 100 metres for the 400 metres, its correspondent concluded: ‘I am inclined to the view that the change will be detrimental to him – but that cannot be helped now.’
Such low expectations worked in Liddell’s favour. He prepared himself without the pestering attentions of His Majesty’s press. The 200 metres, expected to catapult Abrahams towards stellar fame, emphasized the value of that. Abrahams’ entire reason for breathing had been to win the 100 metres gold and take the title of the world’s fastest man. The physical and nervous effort required to achieve his goal siphoned off his strength. Euphoric afterwards, he’d headed to a café on the Boulevard des Italiens to unwind and overdid the beakers of beer and cigars of which he was so fond.30 He was a spent force, unfit mentally and physically. Abrahams finished sixth and last in this second event, shamelessly shovelling a proportion of the blame on Sam Mussabini. Abrahams had complained of feeling ‘very tired’ during the semi-finals; Mussabini attributed it to an overly fast start. Abrahams said that diagnosis persuaded him to take the final ‘rather more slowly’. In this willing surrender, ground was given up that instantly became unrecoverable.
Next morning Liddell read reports about Abrahams’ ‘loss of nerve’.31 He condemned the writers as ‘critics ignorant of the real facts’. He thought the bone-weary Abrahams was just ‘quite run out’. Liddell had finished third in 21.9 seconds, behind Scholz, whose 21.6 was a new Olympic record, and Charley Paddock, a double gold medallist four years earlier. He admired both of them for racing ‘like angels’. His bronze medal was obscured beneath the rock-fall of criticism that buried Abrahams. Stories were slanted towards his failure, which was treated as a calamity. The columns were all but trimmed in funeral black. Liddell hardly got a look-in. His success was a footnote. Even the Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening News ran headlines that forgot where Liddell lived: ‘Abrahams Fails’ and ‘Blank Day for Britain: Our Failure in the 200 Metres’. The Glasgow Herald at least exhibited basic news sense bespoke for a Scottish audience. But what it published – ‘Liddell Home Third’ – relayed the facts without putting out bunting an
d balloons.
Statistics from the 200 metres increased scepticism about Liddell’s capabilities in the longer race. He’d run 22.2 seconds to win his first heat; 21.8 seconds to finish second in the quarter-finals; and 21.8 seconds again in the semis. None of these times suggested Liddell was about to be dealing in 400 metres gold.
Nor did the first two stages of that competition.
The seventeen preliminary heats were boringly routine. Coard Taylor, Horatio Fitch and Eric Liddell, drawn apart from one another, merely went through the motions to qualify. Taylor came home in a sedate 50.4 seconds. Fitch was able to set his own pace because only he and another runner competed, ensuring that both of them would go through anyway. ‘I could not have gone any slower unless I stopped to pick violets on the way,’ he said of his 52-second effort. Liddell clocked 50.2 seconds, inspiring no one to rapture.
The earthquake came in the quarter-finals. Every Olympics produces a surprise. Paris had Josef Imbach, an anonymous Swiss locksmith, who ran a world record of 48 seconds. Since no one had heard of Imbach, no one had considered him a threat. He startled Liddell – ‘he ran so smoothly’, he said – but petrified Fitch and Taylor because neither knew how much faster he could go. Again, the Americans completely ignored Liddell as a possible threat. He’d clocked a competent, though hardly conquering, 49.3 seconds to reach the semis, which made him almost invisible to them.
He became more irrelevant than ever after the semi-finals.
The 400 metres seemed crazy to those who observed it unwind in such unlikely turns and twists, fortune cloaking one runner and then another. Now the hot property was Fitch, who broke Imbach’s world record barely before the Swiss could celebrate the holding of it. ‘It surprised me as much as anyone, especially since I eased up in the last thirty yards to save myself,’ said Fitch.32
The power and the glory: Eric Liddell commands the 400 metres in the Olympic Games in Paris.
Things were suddenly different for him. With a time of 47.8 seconds, he was the undisputed number one over the distance; even more so because Taylor had faded badly, lucky to finish third in the other semi. And Imbach, though ahead of him, had come second. As for Liddell, the man who had beaten both of them, he’d registered only 48.2 seconds.
On the evidence of these times, Fitch was going to waltz it.
In the three and a half hours that separated the semis from the final, conversations in the American camp briefly focused on Imbach and excluded Liddell. Still a little wary of the relatively unknown Swiss runner, the Americans asked themselves whether Imbach had been saving fuel for the final, which would explain his loss. They finally decided otherwise, concluding he hadn’t much energy left. Liddell, so familiar to them, wasn’t labelled as a danger at all. Guy Butler, progressing stealthily, had been on Fitch’s shoulder at the tape. He, rather than Liddell, was seen as the chief British contender.
Just one voice among the Americans thought differently.33
With his rimless spectacles, double-breasted suit and well-combed whitish hair, Jack Moakley looked more like a bookish college academic than the sports godfather of Cornell University. Moakley, then sixty-one, had fifteen years’ experience as head track and field coach there. More pertinently he’d also coached the United States at the Antwerp Olympics, where twenty-nine medals – including nine golds – had made them the most successful nation. Moakley advised his countrymen in Paris, often watching events from a seat near the press box, where he liked the company as well as the vista. He’d taken in the whole of the 400 metres competition. Every critic will spot something different. The best discern detail that others lack the insight to see. Dwelling on excellencies rather than imperfections, Moakley looked at Liddell and rated him far higher than a bit player.
‘That lad Liddell’s a hell of an awful runner,’ he told the American team, having winced at his misshapen running style, before declaring, ‘But he’s got something. I think he’s got what it takes.’
No one listened to him.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dancing the Tango Along the Champs-Elysées
THE THRILL OF sport can lead us into a giddy loss of perspective.1 In attempting to describe the drama of it, there’s always a risk of dissolving into romantic hype. Those who watch it and those who write regularly about it have been equally guilty on that charge because sport appeals to the heart. We want to become emotional about it. And, since the aesthetic and visceral experience is the point of being there, we surrender willingly to that emotion. Time doesn’t darken sport’s notable past deeds; nostalgia instead slings halos around them wider than Saturn’s rings. That’s why sometimes sports history prints the legend and perpetuates the myth, burnished even when the facts are disputable.
But the opposite is true of Eric Liddell in that hot summer of 1924. His win was worthy of every sensational phrase attached to it.
There were headline performances in Paris, particularly from the trio who became known as the Flying Finns: Paavo Nurmi, who claimed five gold medals after running seven races in six days; Ville Ritola, winner of the 3,000-metre steeplechase and the 10,000 metres; and the marathon man Albin Stenroos, who, wearing a white skullcap over his black curls, remained fresh in oppressive heat. There was also the Michigan long jumper William DeHart Hubbard who, at nineteen, became the first African-American champion; the decathlete and high jumper Harold Osborn of Illinois, a double Olympian despite being practically blind in his right eye; and the muscularly handsome Johnny Weissmuller, who won three golds in the pool and, much later, a seven-year Hollywood film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that made him the loin-clothed Tarzan of the jungle.
Harold Abrahams’ blue-ribboned run put him in the same category as the Finns and the Americans, but also highlighted what Liddell had voluntarily given away. Anyone who had picked up a newspaper or listened to a crystal set knew about the principled stand he had taken and also his unfamiliarity with the 400 metres. So no individual story was as poignant as Liddell’s; and no win was as popularly celebrated.
For most of the Games, Paris broiled, as if trapped beneath a thermal blanket. The sprinters and middle-distance runners could just about tolerate the conditions. But to run further than a few laps was to risk heatstroke, dehydration, hallucination and physical incapacity. At the end of the marathon one athlete ran about as though demented and another hared into the stands for no reason. A third came into the stadium and turned the wrong way. An official pointed him in the right direction. The man was so disorientated that he began to run in small circles, like a human corkscrew, until he made himself dizzy and crumpled to the floor. Alongside the Seine there was no shade and the smoke from the factory choked the air and turned it black. On the exposed parts of the course, skin reddened quickly and then burned. To compete was almost suicidal. In temperatures of 113 degrees only fifteen of the thirty-two athletes who started the team 10,000-metre cross-country event reached the Colombes Stadium. John Benham was found dazed in a field by a small boy, who ran a couple of miles to the stadium and, grasping the first British figure he found, spluttered in panicky, broken English, ‘Come quickly, your comrade is dying.’2 An injection of strychnine kept Benham alive. Liddell, sitting in the covered stand, said others’ lives were saved by the ‘narrowest margin’ as doctors and Red Cross ambulances ‘dashed into the arena’. He observed the shirt-sleeved crowd consuming ‘all the available cool drinks and ice-cream blocks’ and queried whether most of them realized ‘what the athletes were going through in the fiery heat’.
Liddell was fortunate. The temperature in Paris on Friday, 11 July – a date he said was ‘more vividly imprinted on my memory’3 than any other – was only 79 degrees. Shortly before 6.30 p.m., after the electric bell called the finalists from the dressing rooms, Liddell found the sting had been drawn from the day. He could breathe without feeling as though the air had been cooked. He’d learned a lesson from Abrahams, who said the three-hour wait he endured between the semi-final and final of the 100 metres made him
feel ‘like a condemned man just before going to the scaffold’. The changing room was cavernous, but almost pit-dark. Athletes leaving it adjusted to the harshness of the light outside by blinking furiously. Competitors and coaches constantly came and went again and the noise of applause and cheering from the crowds reverberated around the place. The highly strung, twitchy Abrahams escaped all this and also the pungent reek of others’ liniment, sweat and massage oil by hiring a private hut nearby. Liddell still overheard him squabbling with Sam Mussabini.4 ‘He had wanted to go around the outskirts of Colombes in a car – “just for a blow” as he put it. Mussabini knew his French taxi drivers and was not going to risk the fruits of a year of patient effort just to satisfy the passing whim of his charge. So he recalled the car just as it was about to start and made Abrahams sit down and sleep instead.’ Liddell sat down and slept too, finding the quietest corner and passing the hours ‘pleasantly enough’, he said.
When he woke up Tom McKerchar slowly massaged his limbs, more out of routine than necessity. ‘Heat makes the muscles loose, so there was no need for massage,’ said Liddell. McKerchar worked in silence. ‘We hardly spoke to one another. Our tactics were agreed.’ Abrahams had been agitated and short-tempered, over-eager for his race to start and then be over. Liddell was serene and amiable, content to let the clock’s hands carry him there. He did not wish Time away. ‘Curiously enough I was quite cool,’5 he explained.
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