Eric Liddell would not run on Sunday, then won Olympic gold anyway

The Olympic schedule came out. Everybody could read it. The heats of the 100 meters would be run on a Sunday, and the favorite from Great Britain, the fastest sprinter in the country, took one look and said: not me.

Picture the reaction in a modern press box. The coaches would be pleading, the sponsors would be calling a lawyer and a panel of experts on television would be explaining how he was throwing away his career over a technicality. Everyone would agree that he was a hero for about eleven minutes, and then everyone would agree that he should have been reasonable.

He was not reasonable. He was right, and the rest of his life proved it.

The man and the decision

Eric Liddell was born in Tientsin, China, on January 16, 1902, the son of Scottish missionaries. He was educated in Britain, and he became one of the best athletes in the country: a sprinter of unusual speed with an awkward, headlong style, and also a rugby player who earned caps for the Scottish national side. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and was a committed Christian who preached as well as ran.

For Liddell, the Sabbath was not a custom but a conviction. He believed Sunday belonged to God, and he treated that as a commitment rather than a preference. The 100 meters, which was his best event and the one in which he was expected to win a medal, had its heats scheduled for a Sunday at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. Sunday, July 6, 1924, to be exact.

The key fact, which the famous film gets wrong, is that Liddell knew well in advance. The schedule was public months before the Games, and he made his decision long before he stepped onto a track in Paris. There was no last-minute crisis on the boat. He had already decided, he told the officials and the press, and he went back to training for the 400 meters, a longer race at which he was a capable runner but not a specialist.

The reaction in Britain was mixed. Some people admired the decision. Others called it stubborn, and some in the press and the athletic establishment treated it as a kind of national embarrassment. Pressure came from officials who wanted a gold medal for Britain and could not see why a man would give up his best chance over a day of the week. Liddell stayed put. There is a story, often told, that a note was handed to him on the way to the 400 meters quoting a verse from 1 Samuel, "Those who honor me I will honor." Whether the story happened exactly as told is the kind of detail a careful historian should flag, and I will flag it. What is beyond doubt is what he did.

On that Sunday in Paris, he went to church. He preached at a Scottish church in the city, and he did not run.

The 400 meters

Here is where the story becomes something close to miraculous, and the facts are good enough that they do not need improvement.

Liddell ran the 200 meters and won the bronze medal, behind two Americans, Jackson Scholz and Charley Paddock. Then, on Friday, July 11, 1924, he ran the 400-meter final. He drew an outside lane, which in that era meant he could not see most of his rivals in the race. He went out fast, much faster than the conventional wisdom said a 400-meter runner should, and he held on. He won the gold medal in 47.6 seconds, a world record at the time, and an Olympic record.

I will leave the tactical analysis to the track experts. What every account of the race agrees on is that Liddell ran it from the front, with his head thrown back and his arms flailing, and that he won. The man who would not run the 100 on a Sunday won gold in the 400 on a weekday, in record time, in an event that was not his own.

Now, I am a believer in the idea that conviction is no guarantee of victory. Plenty of people hold their principles and lose the race. Liddell's win was not a theorem. But it is a fact that the world's most celebrated test of speed was won, in 1924, by a man who had refused the chance to compete in his best event because of his faith. A good story is not proof of anything, but it is allowed to be inspiring.

A missionary's life

If the story ended in Paris, it would be a fine sports anecdote. It does not end there, and the rest is the part that really tells you who the man was.

After the Games, Liddell graduated from Edinburgh, and in 1925 he went to China, the country of his birth, to teach at the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin, a school for Chinese students run by missionaries. He was a science teacher and a coach. He was ordained in 1932. He spent most of the next two decades in China, a country that went through civil war, then Japanese invasion and occupation.

This is the part the sports pages skipped. Liddell had been a national celebrity, a gold medalist, a man who could have lived comfortably on lecture fees and charity dinners, and he chose a life of teaching schoolchildren in a poor and dangerous country. In 1941, as the situation in China grew more dangerous, he sent his wife, Florence, and their two daughters to Canada for safety, and he stayed.

The camp

In 1943 the Japanese authorities interned Western civilians in northern China, and Liddell was held at the Weihsien camp in Shandong province. It was a crowded compound of missionaries, businessmen, teachers and families, living on short rations in cramped quarters.

Accounts from fellow internees paint a remarkably consistent picture. Liddell organized sports for the young people, taught classes, helped the elderly and took on the unpleasant jobs that nobody wanted. The American Langdon Gilkey, who was interned at Weihsien as a young man and later became a theologian, wrote about the camp in his book Shantung Compound and described Liddell as an exemplar of self-giving goodness, which is the kind of testimony you cannot fake because it comes from the men and women who lived beside him.

Liddell was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and he died in the camp on February 21, 1945, at the age of 43. The camp was liberated by American forces in the summer of that year, a few months later. He never saw his third daughter, born after he had sent his family away.

Chariots of Fire and what it got right

In 1981 the film Chariots of Fire told the story of Liddell and his British teammate Harold Abrahams, a Jewish sprinter who won the 100 meters in 1924. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and its Vangelis score became one of the most recognizable pieces of film music of the era.

The film is justly famous, and it is also loose with the facts. It shows Liddell learning of the Sunday heat only as the team travels to Paris, when in fact he knew months in advance. It condenses and rearranges events for drama, as films do. But the heart of it is accurate: a man who refused to compromise a conviction for a medal, and who was honored for it.

I say this as a fan of the film and of the tradition it comes from. It matters that a major studio, in 1981, made a movie in which a religious conviction was treated as a source of strength rather than a pathology to be explained. The coverage of faith in popular culture is not always so generous, and why newsrooms cover believers like a tribe they have never met has something to say about the habit. When Hollywood gets it right, it deserves the applause.

The argument: conviction held at a cost

Now let me extract the lessons, in numbered form, because a story this good should be put to work.

1. A conviction is only a conviction if it costs something. Liddell's principle would have meant nothing if it had been convenient. He gave up his best event, and he knew it. That is what separates a principle from a preference.
2. You may not get the reward you expected, and it may still come. He did not know he would win the 400. He was prepared to lose. The point is that his obedience was not a bet, and the win was a grace note.
3. A person's character shows when the cameras are gone. The man who won the gold in Paris spent the end of his life in a camp, doing small kindnesses for people who would never write about him. The public moment was the lesser part of the story.
4. Convictions are not a form of rudeness. Liddell did not condemn the athletes who ran on Sunday or lecture them about it. He simply did not run. A person can hold a firm position without making a show of it, and the quiet kind is usually the more persuasive.
5. A free society should leave room for such decisions. The United States has long tried to make room for people to keep their Sabbath without losing their livelihoods. See Sunday closing laws, Orthodox Jewish merchants and the 1961 Sabbath rulings for the legal history and two schoolgirls, a flag salute and the 1943 ruling that protected conscience for another case in which the Court protected conscience.

The objection: was it a mistake?

State the strongest objection fairly. "Admirable, but foolish. He had worked for years to be an Olympic champion, and he threw away his best chance on a day-of-the-week scruple that most Christians of his time did not hold. Moreover, many devout Christians run, play and work on Sundays with a clear conscience. Why should his rule bind anyone else?"

It is a fair challenge. Three answers.

First, it does not bind anyone else, and he never said it did. The point is not that every believer must give up Sunday sports. The point is that a person must be allowed to follow his own conscience, and that a decent society honors those who do.

Second, the objection assumes the value of a medal is greater than the value of integrity, which is the very thing at issue. If winning is all that matters, the objection is unanswerable. But most of us, on reflection, do not believe that. We admire the person who refuses to cheat, who keeps a promise at a cost, who will not say what he does not believe. A man who will not break his word for a medal is a man you can trust with more than a medal.

Third, the facts of his life make the objection look thin. He lived and died for a cause bigger than a race. When a man proves in the harshest circumstances that his faith is real, a quibble about whether Sunday running is permitted looks like a footnote.

What the Founding adds

The Founders were not athletes, but they understood the principle at stake. The First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion, and the Constitution's framers knew, from the history of the colonies, what happens to a people when the state or the crowd decides that conscience must yield to convenience. A republic is built from people who will say no to something they believe is wrong, and who are not ruined for it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a very different setting, is the other great example of a man who held to conviction at ruinous cost. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church that would not bow to the Reich tells his story. For the larger idea that a person's work and his faith belong together, Work as a Calling, What Scripture and the Reformers Said About an Ordinary Job makes the case, and The Sabbath is the oldest labor protection on record, so why do we mock it? explains the commandment that Liddell obeyed.

There is also a quiet link to modern controversies about sport and commerce. Whenever the league, the sponsor or the network decides what the athlete must do, the question is the same: who gets to decide what a person will not do? The NBA and China in 2019 and the Week a Tweet Cost a League Its Voice shows what it looks like when an institution gives that question the wrong answer.

The case in brief

1. Eric Liddell, a Scottish sprinter born in China in 1902, withdrew from the 100 meters at the 1924 Paris Olympics because its heats fell on a Sunday, and he had known the schedule well in advance.
2. He won the 400 meters on July 11, 1924, in a world-record 47.6 seconds, an event that was not his specialty, and he won bronze in the 200.
3. He then returned to China as a teacher and missionary, was interned at Weihsien in 1943 and died there on February 21, 1945, at 43.
4. Chariots of Fire (1981) popularized the story, loosely but faithfully in spirit, and it reminds us that a conviction is worth something only when it costs something.
5. A free society should leave room for conscience, and a free person should hold his convictions quietly and firmly.

What you can do: ask your employer, your child's coach or your school in writing what its policy is for religious observance, and be ready to ask for it before the schedule is set.