Eric Liddell Refuses to Run on Sunday

I was there the morning the newspapermen came pounding on the stair door in Edinburgh, and I have never forgotten the sound of it — fists on old wood, urgent, almost angry, as if the man inside owed them something.

We trained together at the University Athletic Club, and by the winter of 1923 into 1924 I had run enough laps behind Eric Liddell to know the sound of his stride before I ever saw his face — that odd, driving rhythm, head tipped back like he was searching the sky for something the rest of us couldn't see. Spectators loved him for it. I loved him for it too, though at the time I only thought of him as the fastest man I had ever shared a cinder track with, a sprinter built for the hundred and the two-twenty, a man who had already broken records at Stamford Bridge the summer before and taken the Harvey Memorial Cup home with him like it was nothing at all.

So when the Games committee in Paris settled its schedule back in January, and word came up to Scotland that the heats of the 100 metres would fall on a Sunday, none of us in the club thought twice about it. It read like a line in a minutes book, nothing more. We didn't know yet what it would cost.

Liddell knew. He had known, I think, from the moment he read it, though he said very little at first — that was his way, quiet until the thing was decided, and then immovable. He was a missionary's son, born out in Tientsin, and Sunday to him was not a mark on a calendar. It was the Lord's Day, and there was no medal in the world, no record, no crowd roaring his name, that could put him on a starting line while it was still light on a Sabbath morning.

By the time the news broke properly into the papers, it wasn't a quiet decision anymore. It was a scandal, or near enough. I stood in the close outside our lodgings one evening and watched grown journalists — men with notebooks and hard hats and harder questions — shoulder past each other to get near the door, calling up through the letterbox for him to come down and explain himself, as though he had committed some crime against the country rather than simply declined to run a race.

Greville Young was there too, another of the runners who trained alongside him, and I remember him saying afterward that the anger in some of those voices frightened him more than it seemed to frighten Eric. Someone shouted through the door that he was a traitor to his country. I heard that word myself, flung up the stairwell like a stone — traitor — for a man who had done nothing except say no to a hundred metres on a Sunday.

Liddell didn't come down and argue with them. He rarely did. When I asked him about it later, walking back from the track at Craiglockhart in the cold, he said it plainly, the way he said most things — that it was his belief, that he wasn't asking anyone else to hold it, but that he would not run on the Sunday, and that was the whole of it. No heat in his voice. No performance of conviction, the way some men wear their principles like a coat to be admired. He simply meant it, and went on training.

There was talk, plenty of it, that the selectors might leave him off the team altogether, that a man who wouldn't run in his best event on demand was more trouble than his speed was worth. But Liddell was too good to discard, and stubborn enough besides. Instead of surrendering the Games, he did something almost nobody expected — he turned his training toward the 400 metres, the quarter-mile, an event he had barely touched at that level, where he had never once gone under 49 seconds. A hundred was a dash, over in ten seconds of violence. A quarter-mile demanded a different kind of courage — pacing, suffering, holding something back and then finding there was nothing left to hold. I watched him work at it through the spring, out at Craiglockhart in his shirt with the arms flailing exactly as they always had, head thrown back, that ungainly, glorious motion that somehow never once looked like a man losing control.

We crossed to France that summer with the rest of the British squad, and Paris in July of 1924 had a heat to it that none of us had trained for — thick, still air over the Stade Olympique de Colombes, dust rising off the cinder track under a sun that seemed to sit directly above the stands rather than moving across the sky at all. I found a place among the crowd for the hundred metres heats on the Sunday, the sixth of July, and it was strange, almost eerie, to watch seventeen heats run off one after another and know that the fastest Scotsman in the field was three miles away in a church pulpit rather than on the blocks.