The more DP thought about the idea, the more excited he became. There was just one problem. He had never heard Robert say anything about Eric’s being a Christian. Still, when DP told the other students about his idea, they, too, were enthusiastic about it. If Eric Liddell was a Christian and would come and speak, they were sure the town hall would be filled with men.
First thing the next morning, DP hitched a ride to Edinburgh. He made his way to the hostel where the Liddell brothers were living. Robert met him at the door, and DP lost no time in telling him why he had come. Robert gave DP a funny look.
“You will ask him for us, won’t you?” DP asked Robert.
Robert shrugged his shoulders. “I think you’d better ask him yourself. He’s out on a run right now, but he should be back soon.”
As they waited for Eric to return, DP and Robert talked about how the evangelistic campaign was progressing across Scotland. After about twenty minutes, the door finally swung open and Eric strolled in. As soon as he saw a stranger sitting with Robert, he stopped and introduced himself. “Hello, I’m Eric Liddell,” he said.
DP was speechless for a moment. Then his words came in a rush. “Hello, I’m David Thomson, DP for short. I’m a friend of Robert. Actually we have been on several evangelistic campaigns together.”
Eric nodded as he pulled up a chair. He’d heard his brother talk about DP.
Nervously, DP spilled out his plan to Eric. When he was finished, Eric sat silently. He put his face in his hands and sighed deeply. DP began to look nervous as if he had said something that was better left unsaid.
After what seemed like an eternity, Eric finally looked up. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it. Tell me where you need me and when.”
Like a hinge swinging a huge door open, that simple statement forever changed the course of Eric’s life. His private life was about to become very public.
Chapter 4
Something Even More Important
On April 6, 1923, Robert Liddell introduced his younger brother to eighty men who had gathered in the Armadale Town Hall. The men cheered as Eric stood up to speak. Eric shifted nervously from foot to foot. He hated being the center of attention. For a moment he just stood and said nothing. Then he took a deep breath and began. He didn’t speak the way a preacher did from the pulpit or a teacher in a schoolroom. Instead he spoke quietly, as if chatting with a good friend. He spoke about how God was in control of his life and how he accepted whatever happened to him as God’s best for that time. He also spoke about how much he knew God loved him and everyone sitting there in the town hall. Then he thanked them for listening and sat down.
To Eric’s surprise, the next day every newspaper in Scotland carried a photo of him and a report on his talk in Armadale. The man who disliked drawing attention to himself was now more famous than ever.
Once Eric had given his first Christian speech, churches and groups everywhere began asking him to come and speak. The next week Eric found himself at another town hall, this one in Rutherglen on the outskirts of Glasgow. This time, six hundred men showed up to hear him. Eric gave them the same simple message he had presented in Armadale, told in the same simple way.
As he stood in front of the crowd in Rutherglen, Eric realized that he had been given a gift, the gift of fame, and that he could use it to share the gospel message with thousands of people. From that moment on, he was never again shy about standing in front of a crowd to speak. Indeed, he tried to accept every speaking invitation he got.
If Eric thought his life was busy before, it was hectic now. During the week he attended lectures and studied for his degree. On the weekends he would go to a track meet and arrange to speak at meetings on the way there and back. Some sports writers began writing that Eric Liddell was trying to do too much and that in the end his running would suffer. But a person had only to look at the races Eric was running in Scotland to see that that wasn’t true. In fact, it seemed just the opposite; the more time Eric gave to speaking, the faster he ran. When asked how he ran so fast, he often told people that he ran as fast as he could for the first half of a race and then asked God to help him run even faster for the second half.
Somewhere in the mind of every schoolboy or schoolgirl who has ever won a race is the tiny dream that one day he or she might win an Olympic medal. Eric had had this dream for a long time. So when the trials for the British team to attend the 1924 Olympic Games were announced, he was anxious to try out for the team. The trials were to be held in Stamford Bridge, London, in early July 1923, and the Olympics themselves were to be held in Paris exactly a year later in July 1924.
Although Eric was the best sprinter in Scotland, he wasn’t automatically assured of a place on the Olympic team to represent Great Britain. Great Britain was made up of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and each of these countries had its own great athletes. The only way to secure a place on the team was to be one of the first three finishers in your event at the British Championships and Olympic Trials in Stamford Bridge.
Eric did that and more! He won both heats and both finals and in the process set a new British record for the 100 yards of 9.7 seconds. (This record would stand for thirty-five years until Peter Radford bettered it by a second.) Eric finished the 220-yard race in 21.6 seconds, his best time ever over that distance. At the end of the competition, he was rewarded with the Harvey Cup for Best Athlete of the Year and, of course, something even more important to him—a place on the British Olympic team. He was entered in both the 100-meter and the 200-meter races. (The Olympic Games use metric measurements to measure the distance of the various events. A meter is approximately three inches longer than a yard.) After the team was announced, newspapers all over Great Britain blazed with stories about “Britain’s best hope for a gold medal in the hundred-meter race.”
The following weekend, the newspapers were announcing even more startling news. Eric had performed a “miracle”! At least, that’s how it had looked to the spectators at Stoke-on-Trent. Eric was representing Scotland in a competition against Ireland and England. He was entered in the 440-yard race, a distance of once around the track. Eric hardly ever ran this distance in competitions, and he was not favored to win. He drew the inside lane, the best lane for the race. As usual, before the start of the race, he shook hands with each contestant, finishing with J. J. Gillies, a runner from England. Gillies was running in the lane next to Eric. When the starter’s gun cracked, both Gillies and Eric got off to a fast start. But it took only a second for disaster to strike. J.J. Gillies, anxious to get into a good position in his lane, bumped into Eric and knocked him over the grass in the center of the track. A gasp went up from the spectators.
Gillies managed to regain his balance and keep running, but Eric lay on the grass. The race was over for him, or so he thought. He assumed he had been disqualified. Suddenly, though, he caught a glimpse of one of the officials waving frantically for him to get up. Apparently he was not disqualified, so he sprang to his feet and sprinted off down the track after the other runners, who were now at least twenty yards in front of him.
Since such races are won by inches, it seemed impossible for Eric to be able to catch up. But somehow, Eric just got faster and faster. Soon the crowd was on its feet, roaring with excitement. Was it possible that Eric could catch up to the others? Yes! He powered past the stragglers in the race. With only forty yards to go, he was in fourth place. He flung his head back even farther than normal and willed his legs to pump faster. His legs obeyed. As the runners headed down the home straight, Eric moved up until he was neck and neck with the leader. Then, with a superhuman burst of speed, he dashed across the finish line in first place.
Eric collapsed onto the track, totally exhausted. As his coach and teammates carried him off the field on a stretcher, the crowd rose to its feet and cheered on their new champion. Eric Liddell’s race that day has been called the greatest quarter-mile race performance of all time.
Eric returned to a hero’s welcome in Scotland. Once again, he had made the Scottish people proud, and his countrymen eagerly awaited the Olympic Games to see their hero win the gold medal in the 100 meters.
Things didn’t work out quite that way, however. One morning in April 1924, three months before the start of the Olympic Games, Eric received a list of the events he was entered in. Beside each event, the times for the heats and the finals were indicated. Beside the heats for the 100-yard sprint was one fateful word: Sunday.
Eric stared at the page for a long time. Sunday. It definitely said Sunday. Eric’s heat to qualify for the final would be run on a Sunday. But Eric would not run on a Sunday. There was no doubt about it in his mind. His coach and the Scottish Athletic Association already knew that he did not run races on Sundays; he never had, and he never would. Since his earliest memory, he’d been taught that Sunday was a day of rest and a day of reverence for God. All his life, Eric had honored that teaching. Sunday was God’s day, and nothing, not even the promise of a gold medal, was going to sway him from that belief.
Eric informed the British Olympic Committee that he couldn’t run in the 100-meter sprint. The newspapers quickly blazed out the news that Eric Liddell had refused to compete for the gold medal in the 100 meters. Now the public, who had admired him for his running ability and his character, turned on him fiercely. Some people even called him a traitor to his country, a man unfit to represent Scotland.
Eric was crushed by the cruel things people said about him, but he would not change his mind. As far as he was concerned, he would not run on Sunday, and that was all there was to it. To make matters worse, the dates for the two relay heats were posted soon afterwards. Both the 4×400-meter and the 4×100-meter relays were to be run on a Sunday. True to form, Eric refused to run in them as well.
The British Olympic Committee met privately with the organizers of the games in Paris, but it seemed there was little they could do about the scheduling of events. If a contestant refused to run on one particular day, the organizers didn’t see it as their problem. Eric accepted this. It was his choice, and so, too, were the consequences of it.
Meanwhile, the British Olympic Committee decided to try to make the best of a bad situation. It asked Eric to consider running the 200-meter and 400-meter races even though he would not be favored to win a medal in either event. Eric agreed. The committee also stepped up its support of Harold Abrahams, the English runner who was still entered in the 100 meters. Harold was not as fast as Eric, but he was the best Great Britain had to offer under the circumstances.
While all this was happening, other things were going on in Eric’s life. Robert had graduated from medical school and had been accepted for a position as a missionary doctor serving with the London Missionary Society in China. The brothers separated, not knowing how long it would be before they would see each other again.
After arriving in China, Robert wrote to Eric about the turmoil that the country was in the midst of. A fierce struggle for political power was going on, and as usual, it was the peasants, farmers, and poor people who suffered the most as a result. These people needed as much help as they could get. As he read the letter, Eric made a decision there and then. He decided to follow in his family’s footsteps and become a missionary to China. He wasn’t sure where he should go in China, so he made plans to go first to Tientsin, where he had been born and where his parents were now stationed. There he could live with his family while he got established. Quietly, without telling anyone, he wrote away to the Anglo-Chinese college in Tientsin to ask if they needed the services of a science teacher or a sports coach. He knew as he posted the letter that he would have to wait several months for a reply. This was fine with him, because he had a lot to do while he waited.
