For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  That morning he had been handed a folded square of paper, a gift from one of the team masseurs.6 Liddell was setting off from the Moderne and slipped the piece of paper into a pocket, promising to read it later. He found a benediction of good luck.

  In the old book it says: ‘He that honours me I will honour.’ Wishing you the best of success always.

  He recognized the slight misquotation from the Bible – 1 Samuel, chapter 2, verse 30 – and this small, private expression of faith and hope moved him profoundly. Someone other than McKerchar believed in him and also in the stance he’d taken.

  Horatio Fitch was still odds on to win; and he expected to do so in a no-nonsense way. The opposition didn’t look formidable to him. Coard Taylor’s confidence had leaked away. Guy Butler’s sore thigh was strapped beneath his shorts. A Canadian, David Johnson, lacked the pedigree to upset him. Josef Imbach was like a once-invincible superhero who had been unmasked. And Liddell? Well, Fitch – forgetting Jack Moakley’s endorsement – never imagined Liddell matching him. Amos Alonzo Stagg told Fitch there was ‘no need to worry about Liddell’7 and dismissed him as ‘a sprinter’ who would ‘pass out 50 yards from the finish’.

  But being a sprinter actually gave Liddell two distinct advantages. The sun had baked the cinder hard, making it ideal for him. Also, the six-lane Colombes track was 500 metres long. The 400 metres race, beginning on the last straight, was run in a horseshoe shape. Liddell was best equipped to exploit the single bend. Everything had been thought through. Liddell hadn’t wanted to be talked about as the favourite; and he hadn’t intended to burn his energy low in the heats or the semis when qualification alone, not records or adulation, mattered. ‘Despite the times the others had put up, I felt fairly confident.8 I had been running well within myself, and I felt absolutely keyed up to run the race of my life,’ he said.

  Already half-thinking of himself as an Olympic champion, Fitch realized none of this. The American newspapers didn’t realize it either. Those with European editions published tables awarding the US team the 400 metres winner’s points in advance, believing it to be a foregone conclusion.

  Liddell was digging out his start holes when Joe Binks wandered down from the press box, wanting to pass on good wishes and a hunch about tactics.9 Binks always remembered what he said: ‘I suggested an occasion on which he should “run mad”, keep in front and make all the other five come after him to the tape.’ He always remembered Liddell’s reply too: ‘I think that’s a good idea.’

  Pathé newsreel film of the 1924 Olympic 400 metres final lasts one minute and twelve seconds. The cameras used were static and positioned at ground level. There is no sound, but what the cinema audience saw, only a few days after the newspapers and the radio had told them of the outcome, conveyed the strength of Eric Liddell’s running.

  He’s seen in close-up at first, the light falling flatly across his face. Hands on hips, his long fingers with their well-cut nails are stretched across them. His kit looks a little rumpled, as if he’s slept in it – though his dark eyes and the baggy lines beneath them suggest he hasn’t been sleeping nearly enough. His lips are pursed so tightly that the mouth almost disappears until his head swivels, ever so briefly, towards the camera. He licks his top lip to moisten it. Then his expression becomes a study in concentration again. He stares with a firm fixity down the outside lane, which is where the ballot has consigned him – the worst possible position because he won’t know until the last straight whether he’s in front or behind the others. The number 451 is stencilled on to a rectangle of cloth, which is pinned to his short-sleeved white running shirt. The imprint of the Union Jack, depicted rippling on a pole, is stitched above the number.

  Behind him the crowd, predominantly male and predominantly middle-aged, are assembled in front of narrow benches beneath the upward slope of a roof. No one wants to sit down. The back of the stand is in shadow, the faces indistinct. Those at the front press against a high-pointed metal railing and are caught in a bloom of bright sun. The men wear three-piece suits; there’s the odd glint of a watch-chain roped across a waistcoat. Most are in trilbies or newsboy caps as broad as dinner plates. Others, more conscious of elegance and the weather, wear straw boaters. One woman stands out. Amid the swell of dark suits she is resplendent in white – white calf-length dress, white hat, a pair of white elbow-length gloves. It’s as though she’s wandered in from a Manet painting. In the uncovered part of the stadium, where there is only shallow terracing, some spectators have put up umbrellas to shield themselves against the drop of the sun. There’s a noticeable cross-wind, the flags of the nations at the southern end blown almost straight, like the one on Liddell’s chest.

  The camera doesn’t capture what oral evidence preserves as fact: that, as ever, Liddell walked over to each of his rivals and shook hands with them before settling into the starting holes, which Joe Binks had seen him dig with a tiny silver trowel; that, as Liddell recalled, ‘the vast crowd seethed with emotion’, a hubbub so loud that the bowler-hatted starter had to ask the tannoy announcer to yell for silence because he feared the athletes wouldn’t hear the call to their marks; that the silence he got after the appeal was like the hush of a church; that then the evening air was filled with the blast of the Cameron Highlanders marching band, who broke into eight bars of ‘Scotland The Brave’ – a cheeky indulgence breaching protocol; and that officious stewards attempted to stifle it, tearing towards Philip Christison, who on a whim had given the order to play the battle hymn to inspire his countryman.

  Liddell is about to meet his moment. On the red scoria cinders of the Colombes Stadium, a nice guy is about to finish first. You know it as soon as the gun cracks.

  He goes off as if he’s been catapulted from the line. He makes everyone else look perambulatory. He burns up the track and burns off those chasing him, who see nothing but the arch of his back and the kick of his heels, which throw up puffs of cinder rising as high as his ankles. The toes of his black shoes leave a trail of scuffing as small as a child’s footprints along a sandy beach. ‘I got the perfect start,’ he said.

  The textbook approach was to begin the race with a sprint, constituting an all-out effort, before easing off slightly at 40 or 50 metres and settling into an even stride until the three-quarter mark when the muscles of the upper torso and the shoulders begin to power the final thrust of the body. He did what no one else had ever done. Because he was in the outside lane – and because he thought Horatio Fitch and Josef Imbach ‘were the best placed’ on the inside – Liddell said he gave himself this single instruction: ‘Go all out – and don’t be behind at the last straight.’10 Liddell and McKerchar decided on these tactics long before Binks came to the same conclusion. The shape and the hardness of that track was one reason. The stamina in Liddell’s legs was another. The certainty that he would soon exhaust the field was a third.

  Sluggish out of the blocks? Slow to get going? Not today.

  Free tickets for the competitors offered only an angled view, which made it impossible to judge the state of the race. So Harold Abrahams has paid an exorbitant 10 shillings for a ticket opposite the finish line. Sitting beside Sam Mussabini, he is aghast at the risk Liddell is taking: ‘He went off at such a terrific pace that it seemed as if he must crack before the end . . . it seemed impossible that he should last the distance.’11 Arthur Marshall can’t believe what he’s seeing either.12 ‘He just pounded along,’ he said, comparing Liddell to a super-fast train. And Guy Butler, already lagging 10 yards behind, is telling himself that no human can sustain ‘an all out sprint’ like this.

  Even Liddell conceded he was thinking: ‘Can I last home?’13

  His split time is a phenomenal 22.2 – just 0.6 of a second slower than Jackson Scholz in the 200 metres final.

  Fitch has begun ‘the way I always did – coasting a little’. Everyone still expects him to take gold; Fitch still expects it too because of his ‘good kick’. He is waiting for Liddell to slow, absolutely sure his coach’
s prediction is about to come true. Liddell will buckle and pant along the home straight. He will rue the decision he’s made. Countering the bias of the bend, distorting his advantage, is certain to tire him.

  But Liddell does not tire. He accelerates, his head – as it always is – tilted heavenward as he runs, as though in prayer to the skies. In the 200 metres Liddell conceded that he couldn’t increase his speed ‘by a fraction of an inch’. Now it comes to him when he summons it. He gets a second wind and then a third. Fitch makes his own burst and closes in. He thinks he is going to draw level and overtake Liddell; that the prize belongs to him now. The thought comes and leaves him in a nanosecond. For what he sees next destroys it and in retrospect makes the idea delusional. Liddell first senses Fitch’s approach and then sees him in his peripheral vision. He puffs out his cheeks, throws his head further back still and, from somewhere, finds an even fiercer fire within him. ‘Not until I got to the top of the straight did it suddenly dawn on me that I was several yards in front of the field,’ he said.14

  At 70 yards from the tape, still feeling that Fitch is nearest to him, Liddell pulls away again – pushing himself unstoppably on, as though sheer will is supplanting strength. The lead seized at the start is his at the finish. And in the closing strides what Liddell feels is liberation, justification, triumph. He knows he’s uncatchable. He knows he’s about to win. ‘A comforting thought flashed into my mind.15 I could no longer see the second man behind me,’ he said. He doesn’t see the tape either. He simply feels it break against his body, his eyes still fixed on the sky.

  Coard Taylor pulled a muscle and stumbled in his bid to throw himself after Liddell and a consolation medal. The front of his shirt was stained with cinder the colour of blood. Imbach had fallen after becoming ensnared in a line marker, those loops of white string attached to thin, 8-inch-high metal poles that divided the lanes and made them look like a market gardener’s plot for sowing peas. Butler took advantage of both misfortunes to finish third. And Fitch, who had thought of himself as the predator, had become the prey, a silver medal hardly satisfying. The best in the world had beaten the rest of the world; Fitch had no option but to accept it. ‘I had no idea he would win it. I couldn’t believe a man could set such a pace and finish.’16 He likened Liddell to someone ‘possessed’.

  ‘I was amazed to find that I had won by six yards,’ said Liddell.17 He confessed to being ‘more amazed’18 at his time – 47.6 seconds, another world record. Inside twenty-six wild hours it had been broken, re-broken and broken again.

  A second from glory. Eric Liddell about to burst the tape and win his Olympic gold. Closest to him is Horatio Fitch. The other American, Coard Taylor, struggles to his feet in one of the middle lanes.

  For this piece of live, unscripted theatre the applause – a landslide of noise – rolled down from the stands and on to the track. There were whoops and cheering. Flags were waved. Hats were thrown. Kisses were blown. Mussabini said the spectators went ‘crazy mad’ for Liddell, who acknowledged so modestly the acclaim Paris gave him. There was a smile, a wave, a raised arm, a nod of the head. Within a minute of taking the tape Liddell stopped breathing heavily, rose from a stooped position, hands on knees, and straightened himself up to look around, as if savouring a sight he never expected to see. He appeared fit and fresh, like a gentleman who had just come back from a bracing constitutional. The others were wrung dry and still semi-stooped. ‘The strange thing was that, despite the race I had run, and the time I had run it in, I was quite cool and collected and not in the least distressed. I felt perfectly strong,’ said Liddell.

  The reporter from the Glasgow Herald was in shock. He consequently gave his readers the impression that Liddell belonged to a super-species, capable of achieving what the mere mortals among us would find physiologically impossible. He likened the Christian to ‘some demon’. He confessed that watching Liddell tear away from everyone else early on had alarmed him. As if expecting the heart to burst or the body to fracture under the strain, he explained, ‘I feared that he would kill himself by the terrible speed he had set up.’

  The victor and the vanquished. Eric Liddell crosses the line well ahead of his nearest rival, Horatio Fitch.

  The most poetic and rhapsodic account of the race was penned by Grantland Rice in the New York Herald Tribune. He was then – and for a good while afterwards too – the most famous sports correspondent in America. When Collier’s hired Rice as a columnist during that Olympic year, it said of him: ‘His name spells colour, dash, action, drama – as well as honesty and soundness.’ Rice was Wordsworthian in his prose. In celebrating Liddell he also celebrated everything that was tartan; or, at least, everything that was stereotypically Scottish. ‘The Olympic atmosphere,’ he wrote, ‘was rife with the resonant melody of Scottish bagpipes, thistles, braes, bluebells and a new world record . . . from Highland to Lowland it was Scotland for Ever . . . the fluttering kilts took another twirl in honour of one of the greatest runners any nation ever sent to glory.’ Rice saw Liddell as the ‘Scotch meteor, flaming along’ with ‘whirring feet’ and added: ‘Fitch and the others may as well have been chasing an antelope startled into top speed, or some high powered motor driven by a Paris taxi-driver.’ He thought ‘some divine power’ had dragged him along.

  A few minutes after the Olympic final. Horatio Fitch still looks as though he can’t quite believe Liddell’s ferocious pace has beaten him.

  Liddell and Fitch posed together, shaking hands for the photographers, who gathered in a semi-circle in front of them.19 Their long, pale shadows stretched across the field. Fitch wore an expression mid-way between a smile and a grimace. Strands of Liddell’s hair had been blown awry. Otherwise, he was so composed he could have been asking Fitch whether the two of them might race again purely for the fun of it. Fitch found him somewhat formal. ‘I’d guess you’d say stiff,’ he said. ‘You’d congratulate him and he’d just say “thank you”.’

  In the aftermath of the 400 metres final, Eric Liddell looks fit enough to run another race immediately.

  The Olympics didn’t indulge in ceremony in 1924. There was no medal presentation because there was no medal for him. There was no podium and no national anthem either. His gold would be engraved and posted on to Scotland later, wrapped in brown paper and string. So once the photographers had finished with him, and the crowd had begun to scatter homeward, Liddell slipped back into the dressing rooms with the minimum of fuss. The British team was waiting for him at the head of the tunnel leading to the changing room. John Benham was the first to extend his hand in congratulations. ‘Before I knew where I was he grabbed me and got me upon his shoulders. I was carried by a big, excited crowd of my fellow country-men,’ said Liddell. ‘It was an experience I will always remember.’

  Tom McKerchar made him lie down and rest and then began the post-race massage. ‘He thought I needed a little quiet after the wild reception I got,’ said Liddell. Knowing Liddell’s habits so well, McKerchar expected him to go back to the hotel and stretch out on the bed. For once, Liddell surprised him. He dispatched a telegram to his parents in China, telling them of his win, and then announced he was ‘going on the town’ with Marshall. Freddie and Edith, the two sisters Liddell had met on the boat home from America in April, were on the Paris leg of their Grand Tour. The four of them headed for a Tango Tea Dance on the Champs-Elysées. The girls drank champagne. Wearing his Olympic blazer and flannels, Liddell sipped apple juice, the colour of hard liquor, and trod the floor with gusto. He was a nifty mover. Wanting to celebrate, Freddie and Edith suggested that Liddell ought to toast his entry into the Olympic pantheon with a tiny swallow of champagne. ‘That would mean less for you,’ he said, remaining abstemious and offering to dance as long as his legs would let him. The evening wore on and the adrenalin of his victory got Liddell through it. Near midnight, Marshall and the two women peeled off into a night club. Liddell made his excuses and said his goodbyes.

  Everyone revels in a winner. The newspaper
s, so apathetic about Liddell beforehand, treated him exultantly the next morning. The Scotsman wrote of the Union Jack flying in ‘proud majesty’, the ‘gasp of astonishment’ Liddell’s running inspired and the ‘frenzy of enthusiasm’ for his win. The Edinburgh Evening News announced that ‘thrill followed thrill’ for him. The French anointed him ‘L’homme à vapeur’ – the man of steam. To the Americans he was ‘a thin legged Scotch divinity student’, the ‘spindly preacher’ and, most colourfully, ‘The Flying Parson’ after being mistakenly identified as an apprentice Church of England minister. He didn’t mind either the inaccuracy or that sobriquet, which conjured an image of someone running in a dog collar. ‘If the papers want to call me the Flying Parson to lend another touch of picturesqueness to their copy, I certainly have no quarrel with them on that point,’ said Liddell, describing it as a ‘little additional touch’ of licence that ‘did no harm’.20

  The news agency Reuters captured the mood best of all.21 ‘Liddell has made himself one of the most popular men in Paris,’ it said. ‘Certainly there has not been a more popular win.’

  Asked about his triumph in its immediate aftermath, the popular man of Paris was shyly circumspect. Not wanting to boast or gloat, Liddell claimed, as if regarding himself as an accidental champion, that he’d been ‘very fortunate’22 to have ‘touched the top of my form at just the right moment’. However fortunate he felt, the Olympics were more fortunate still to have him on the roll of honour.

  He was a poster boy, and how sorely the Games needed him.

  Almost every Olympics closes with the encomium that it has been ‘the Best Ever’. After all, it is always a guest’s polite obligation to flatter the host. Paris was different.

  These Olympics were the first in which the motto ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ slipped into common usage as a commitment to unimpeachable ideals. But, like so many that have followed them, the 1924 Games became enmeshed in ugly rows and recriminations through an amalgam of pig-headed pettiness, arrogance, pride, oneupmanship, score-settling, cheating and, above all, a warped sense of patriotism.