Paris got the Olympics to feed the vanity and self-interest of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who got the idea to revive them in the 1880s. He wanted to mark the Games’ ‘proper’ rebirth in his own birthplace. He wanted to atone for the pantomime shambles staged there in 1900. And he wanted to show off. The 1900 Games had been grandiose in ambition but farcical in execution. Had Coubertin been the head of a corporation, he’d have been sacked afterwards for gross negligence. The Games were supposed to complement the World’s Fair. But there was no signage or logo to promote the term ‘Olympic’. There was no new stadium, which Coubertin had promised. The Games embraced sports such as ballooning, cricket, croquet and Basque pelota and stretched from May until the last week of October in a marathon of public uninterestedness. The total number of spectators some of the sports attracted wouldn’t have filled the Folies Bergère.
Now Coubertin was sixty-one years old. He looked seventy-five. His hair was milk-white. So was his moustache. About to retire as president of the International Olympic Committee, Coubertin had imagined a comfortably grand ride into retirement, a kingly parade of affection for services rendered. What he got were barbed questions about whether the Olympics were worth preserving.23
Colombes was less than a hundred miles from the mud of the Great War. For the second successive Olympics, Germany’s invitation was never posted. So the Americans initially took the brunt of French hostility and xenophobia. Their rugby team was refused entry at Boulogne and then also refused the use of the Olympic Stadium in which to train. The players were barracked and spat at along the shopping boulevards. Their money and jewellery were stolen during a training session. The rugby final, pitting them against the French, should have been held in a roped ring. It degenerated into brawls on and off the pitch. American fans were beaten. One was smashed in the mouth with a walking stick. After America won 17–3, there was mayhem. Bottles and lumps of rock as big as fists were thrown on to the field. A police escort was necessary to shepherd the gold medallists to safety.
This explicit anti-Americanism was not an isolated incident either. The New York Times reported that ‘every losing stroke’ by Helen Wills – then the US champion – ‘was cheered’ in the women’s tennis final. ‘Far from serving the cause of French popularity [the Games] have left in the mind of not a few of the competing teams and with the public a feeling of irritation and distaste,’ it concluded. The Times was much blunter: ‘In contrast with the persistent hostility to the Americans . . . our treatment . . . has seemed almost cordial.’
The crucial word in that line is ‘almost’. Britain’s middle-weight boxer, Harry Mallin, wiry and curly-haired – he looked like a floor-mop sent into battle – was bitten on the chest and ear in a bout against a local fighter. The partisan crowd, which saw slights everywhere, later pelted a referee with coins after a decision went against another Frenchman.
These were minor scuffles in comparison to the infamy of the fencing competition. Italy and Hungary became embroiled in a conflict so rancid that it sullied both of them. Four months later, in a sequel that belongs to the age of Dumas’s Musketeers, two competitors slashed and badly wounded each other in a duel staged as a consequence of the bad feeling Paris had stirred.
The Times’ Olympic correspondent was sixty-four-year-old Sir Harry Perry Robinson, who had won the Legion of Honour and contributed to the publicity machine behind William McKinley’s successful presidential campaign in 1896. The Olympic shenanigans disgusted Robinson, who damned the ‘uproars’ and ‘quarrels’ he saw. ‘Nothing has been generated except international ill will,’ he wrote. ‘The sum total is deplorable . . . The Games are a grievous failure.’ His piece appeared below the headline ‘The Olympic Games Doomed’. Robinson’s muscular attack particularly impressed the New York Times, which quoted him before asking the question it insisted any ‘thinking Frenchman’ was asking himself: ‘Were the Olympic Games worthwhile?’
Coubertin spluttered an unsatisfactory reply to that. He cited ‘unprecedented successes’ – without adequately cataloguing them – and then celebrated their competitors as ‘gentlemen’. As an example of dreamy imagination, it was heartfelt. As a robust and coherent defence, it was nonsense on stilts.
Among all the grubbiness, Eric Liddell stood out more virtuously than ever: the personification of athletic prowess on the track, the embodiment of self-sacrifice and sportsmanship off it. He was a walking advertisement for Olympian ideals. Performances such as his own, especially seen against the back-story of his personal convictions, answered the New York Times’s question better than Coubertin.
Liddell was the hero, feted for proving the Games weren’t irrevocably rotten at the root.
CHAPTER SIX
Not for Sale at Any Price
ERIC LIDDELL EXPECTED only a handful of well-wishers at Victoria station.1 What he saw instead, through the steam, smoke and smuts, was the crush of a crowd, heaving between the ribbed Ionic columns planted along the platform and also pushing against the door of his carriage. At the sight of him, there was cheering and a chorus of ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’. The song echoed beneath the soaring canopy of the partly glassed roof. It was so loud, according to the London Evening News reporter dispatched there, that ‘every other noise in a noisy station seemed quite quiet’. He said he couldn’t ‘recall such a demonstration’ for previous Olympians. ‘Liddell was the biggest lion,’ he added, making it clear who the fans favoured. Flags were waved – both the Scottish saltire and the Union Jack. Phosphorescent flash bulbs went off like summer lightning. Liddell was swept up and carried shoulder-high for some distance, somewhat unsteadily at first. At one point he glanced behind him, afraid his trunk and two cases would be lost or left behind in the confusion. A British Olympic official, brandishing a Union Jack, eventually pushed him into a taxi, which the man from the London Evening News saw become ‘the centre of outstretched hands until the driver got going’.
Liddell was taken aback. He now knew what Jim Thorpe felt after returning from the 1912 Games in Stockholm as pentathlon and decathlon champion.2 New York threw him a ticker-tape parade. ‘I heard people calling my name,’ said Thorpe. ‘I didn’t realise how one fellow could have so many friends.’
Liddell was a celebrity, made so in part because of a new medium. The Paris Olympics were the first widely available on radio. The BBC, created less than two years earlier, incorporated reports from the Games into its evening news bulletins at seven and ten o’clock. Anyone with a crystal set no longer had to wait until the newspaper presses rolled overnight to find out the results from Paris. Memory is a fickle beast, always liable to play a trick or two. One of Liddell’s housemates in George Square swore the 400 metres final was broadcast live and even offered a verbatim account of the commentary, insisting it contained tally-ho and golly-gosh exclamations such as ‘Oh, what a race!’3 When Liddell ran, the BBC was broadcasting Children’s Corner – specifically the second part of Treasure Island, a quite different pursuit of gold.4 But, though still in its screaming infancy, the novelty of radio impacted on the consciousness of those who heard it and so lifted Liddell’s profile. The BBC’s listeners bought the newspapers more eagerly than ever next morning and then wanted to see Liddell in the flesh, a scenario he had never envisaged.
What greeted him at Victoria was repeated at Waverley on his arrival in Edinburgh – another mass of people, another serenade of triumph, another thousand and one autograph books stuck in front of him.5
Serendipity dictated that Liddell’s graduation as a Bachelor of Science came only six days after winning in Paris.6 Demand for tickets was unprecedented. In the tiered, domed auditorium of McEwan Hall, the inside of which is cathedral-like, the university turned the ceremony into an ostentatious Olympic occasion.
Oleaster sprigs from the Royal Botanical Gardens were entwined into a chaplet to imitate the laurel crown of ancient Greece. Pindar, the cantata poet of Thebes, wrote fourteen Epinician odes to celebrate Olympians such as Diagoras of Rhod
es and Xenophon of Corinth.7 He observed that no one ever looked ‘askance’ at the praise lavished on them afterwards. What was true in Pindar’s classical Greece remained true for Liddell in the motorized age of George V, for the university penned a Pindaric pastiche on his behalf, which was put on a scroll and read aloud. The epigram spoke of Liddell’s ‘laurelled brow’, the speed he’d displayed in Paris as being ‘as none hath shown till now’, and said of the chaplet: ‘While you wear it, may Heaven never frown.’ The Vice Chancellor strove to craft an apt sentence of his own, delivered the way a vaudeville comedian delivers a gag. ‘Mr Liddell,’ he said, ‘you have shown that none can pass you but the examiner.’ The bon mot was treated like a piece of razory wit from Oscar Wilde.
A recipient of an honorary degree that morning, the writer, socialist and social reformer Beatrice Webb complained sniffily in her diary about the ‘lengthy process’ and the ‘endless procession’ of speeches and presentations.8 She refused to attend the evening function because of it. Webb was alone in her dissent.
There is a photograph of Liddell being carried afterwards through the partly cobbled maze of Edinburgh’s Old Town on a sedan chair, like a sultan of the East. It conspicuously demonstrates the affection towards him and also the pride others felt in his achievement. He stares barrel-straight into the camera lens. The face is noticeably tanned after the burning his skin took in Paris. Those around him appear as pale as parchment, as if the beauty of the summer has never crept that far north. Liddell’s long dark gown hangs in creased bunches around his shoulders and upper arms like puffed sleeves. His right elbow rests on the wooden arm of the chair. His left hand grips the scrolls he’s been given, the knuckles bony and prominent, and his wing-collared shirt and bow tie give him a stylish, if raffishly insouciant, air. What strikes you most about the picture is the joy in his smile. For once Liddell, basking in the light of his own glory, is absolutely at ease. The men in striped ties and three-buttoned wool suits, their hair shiny-slick with brilliantine, are privileged to bear him aloft. You see it in their expressions, reflecting the distinction of this volunteered task, which is something to be boasted about in old age.
Laurels for the scholar: Fellow students chair the Olympic champion after his graduation ceremony at Edinburgh University.
Liddell was pressed into giving a minute-long speech from the worn top step of St Giles Cathedral. Framed in the deep raked mouldings of its Gothic arch, he stood as still as the stone statues stacked in the niches above him. He then quoted the ‘dust of defeat’ motto at the University of Pennsylvania. It encapsulated what he knew to be fact: the gap between coming first and coming nowhere was infinitesimal. His own race was proof of it – the stagger of Josef Imbach, the collapse of Coard Taylor and Guy Butler’s strapped leg. Each of them had lost when he had won; but Liddell appreciated how easily it could have been otherwise. And if the 100 metres heats had not been run on a Sunday, he’d still be a stranger to the distance that now belonged to him. History has a habit of either denigrating losers or ignoring them altogether, as if finishing second is a sackcloth-and-ashes disgrace. Liddell wanted to highlight the injustice of that. So he told his audience what the University of Pennsylvania motto meant to him in the hope that it would mean the same to them too. ‘There are many men and women who have done their best, but who have not succeeded in gaining the laurels of victory,’ he said solemnly. ‘To them, as much honour is due as to those who have received those laurels.’
He was thinking of one athlete in particular.
Every day Paris had toasted exemplary track performances, chiefly from the Finns, who with modern training techniques, a dried-fish and black-bread diet and astute tactical thinking turned competition into a science. Their athletes ran like automatons. As Eric Liddell said of them, ‘You could almost hear the purr of their engines.’ He labelled Paavo Nurmi as ‘a freak . . . a marvellous piece of intelligent mechanism’. But Nurmi, despite his remorseless accumulation of gold medals and records, wasn’t the Olympics’ stand-out man for Liddell. Neither was Harold Abrahams.
Liddell’s role model was Henry Stallard, a true ‘hero’.9
Among myriad definitions of that word, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary lists ‘superhuman strength . . . distinguished by performance . . . an illustrious warrior’. In Paris the newspapers automatically slotted any gold medallist into those hoary categorizations. But, like beauty, heroism is in the eye of the beholder; and qualifying as a hero as far as Liddell was concerned had nothing to do with winning and everything to do with sportsmanship, which he quantified as ‘playing for your side or country and not for yourself’. He wavered only once from that rule. When Philip Christison had gone to offer his congratulations in the dressing room at the Colombes Stadium, Liddell thanked him for that unexpected piped fragment of ‘Scotland The Brave’ before adding, ‘I don’t think it put an extra yard on me.’10 In cold type the quotation reads like a sharp put-down. In reality, it was a tutorial. ‘Don’t forget,’ explained Liddell, ‘I wasn’t running for Scotland. The Olympics aren’t like that. They are individual events to find out who is the best in his particular event. I ran for myself to prove that I was the best in my event.’ Running ‘for myself’ sounds not only selfish but also like a fundamental contradiction of his core beliefs – until Liddell provides qualification for it. ‘We’ve had enough struggles between nations,’ he said to Christison. At Eltham College, Liddell had become all too familiar with morning assemblies that began with the reading of a name, the sombre marking of another casualty of a war that was supposed to end every other; a war, moreover, that burned its brand even on the lives of those who were only distant spectators.11 A total of thirty-four former Eltham pupils were killed in the fighting. The youngest was barely twenty years old. Liddell didn’t want the Olympics to become a substitute for nationalist conflict minus the shooting. The war had taught him to handle the term ‘hero’ with extreme care.
Stallard won only a bronze in Paris. What mattered to Liddell was the way he won it. ‘No one brought more lustre to our achievements,’ he insisted.
Stallard was the overwhelming favourite for the 800 metres. ‘Many of us were hoping that he would finish first,’ explained Liddell, aware of his friend’s declaration that Paris would be his farewell to the Olympics. What Stallard concealed, however, was the reoccurrence of two old injuries to the arch of his right foot and to a bone near his ankle. Leading the race on the final bend, he faltered. As Douglas Lowe zipped past him, Stallard yelled, ‘Go on. Win it. You can do it.’ Stallard trailed in fourth and afterwards needed morphine to numb the extreme pain. He hobbled back to the team hotel on a walking stick. ‘No one for a moment dreamed that he would run again,’ said Liddell, also convinced that Stallard, knowing he couldn’t win himself, had engineered Lowe’s success with a speedy first lap designed to tire the Americans.
Stallard had already reached the final of the 1,500 metres – another of Nurmi’s events – and the prospect of scratching from it was inconceivable to him. Philip Noel-Baker attempted to persuade him not to compete. He pointed out, as if Stallard couldn’t count, that it would be his fifth race in five days. Noel-Baker also stressed the long-term damage Stallard might do to his health. Stallard appreciated the risks. The physiology of the human body was his trade: he was a medical student at St Bartholomew’s. Stallard saw it as his duty to take on Nurmi. Not to do so would be disappointing Britain, a mortifying prospect for him. Stallard received another dose of morphine and Liddell watched him bind up his foot and ankle with a roll of sticking plaster and crêpe bandages. ‘Every time he put his foot down he was in agony,’ he said.
Nurmi was unbeatable. His only opponent was the clock. With 120 metres to go, Stallard ruptured a tendon. He chased on regardless, taking himself beyond the edge of exhaustion. As he crossed the line, in third place, he staggered and collapsed head first on to the track. He was carried off on a canvas stretcher and remained unconscious for more than thirty minutes. Stallard awoke w
ith no recollection of completing the home straight. No matter how hard he tried to dredge up a solid memory of those last ten seconds, nothing would come to him, either then or in the future. The picture in his mind was always blank. ‘My brain suddenly went red hot,’ he explained. ‘The next thing I remember was someone rubbing my temples with ice.’ When Stallard came round on the massage table, he found Noel-Baker standing over him with a furrowed brow and a hand on his shoulder. Noel-Baker was about to express his concern when Stallard spoke first. ‘Sorry for the very bad show,’ he said.
Thinking Stallard’s bronze medal was equal in worth and weight to his own gold because of the circumstances in which his friend fought to win it, Liddell described the display as ‘one of the most heroic things in the history of athletics’.
The music accompanying the modern gold medallist is the bell-ring of the cash till. Sponsors await him. Commercial brands are ready to bear his name, and there is an agent to barter on his behalf.
Eric Liddell had only D. P. Thomson.
What Thomson recognized was the chance to capitalize fully on his pupil’s pulling power. Liddell would altruistically rake in people rather than money, though there would be pass-the-hat donations – mostly copper coins rather than silver – as a consequence of his speaking engagements. Early on Thomson, in charge of the events diary, contributed an article to the Glasgow Herald that was part personal profile and part advertisement. ‘The name E. H. Liddell is fast becoming known as a speaker to young men,’ said Thomson, as if appealing for bookings.
The Sunday after winning his gold medal Liddell spoke in the Scots Kirk on Rue Bayard. If an Olympic champion went into the pulpit today, less than forty-eight hours after his race, the regular congregation would find the pews filled with reporters, the aisles snaked with television cables and the glare and heat of arc lights upon them. Liddell’s appearance was relatively unobtrusive. All that survives is a shadowed photograph – Liddell shakes hands with the elderly minister after the service – and the briefest of agency reports, thought so inconsequential that Britain’s high-circulation newspapers spiked it. The Kirk was full: ‘The Olympic record breaker . . . drew almost as many admirers . . . to hear him preach as went to Colombes to see him run,’ said the correspondent who listened to him.
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