 Olympic torch 2012 as it passes through Penicuik
 Liddell on way to a win
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| | | Eric Liddell Olympic Champion and Missionary |
 The
service on Sunday 10th June took Eric Liddell as the theme. The
Sunday School children, who have been studying the life of Eric Liddell
took a baton that Sandy Robertson had brought with him, round the
church aisles in a relay.
Sandy then told us the story of Eric Liddell's olympic and religious life, see below.
Paris, 1924- six years after the end of the First World War. The band of the second  battalion,
the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders is swinging down the Champs
Elysees towards the tomb of the Unknown Warrior with the Olympic teams
in tow, because Paris in 1924 is hosting the Olympic Games at Colombes
stadium. As the wreath is laid and the minute’s silence observed,
many of the athletes are thinking of their comrades slain in the recent
conflict; one man, a Scotsman in the G.B. team, may well be thinking of
his fellow-countryman, Wyndham Halswelle, Olympic 400mLiddell o way to a win
Champion in London in 1908, whose life was cut short by a
sniper’s bullet in the trenches of Neuve Chappelle; the man is
Eric Liddell from Edinburgh, and his ambition is to emulate his
compatriot’s feat of winning the Olympic quarter
mile.
The quarter is considered to be a man- killer, an
event for the ancient Stoics, impervious to pain, an event where high
blood acidity must be tolerated during the latter stages of the race.
Eric
Liddell, Scottish Rugby winger and international sprinter, winner of
the British 100m and 200m titles, and a committed Christian, has a
simple answer for anyone who asks him about his 400m racing
tactics,
‘I run the first 200 as fast as I can…then,
for the second 200, with God’s help, I run harder.’
I’ll second that.
Live a life that measures up to the standard God set when he called you:
 Most
people know the story of Eric Liddell’s Sunday Observance.
However, license was used in the film, ‘Chariots of
Fire’ because rather than making a last minute decision,
Liddell was able to decide in January 1924 when the Olympic
programme was announced; told, in an effort to dissuade
him, that the continental Sunday finished at midday, Liddell replied,
‘My Sunday lasts all day’.
Eric lined up in
the outside lane, used his trowel to dig his starting holes [in the
days before blocks], and shook the hands of his five rivals. There
being no live television transmission, and times being more
arbitrary, the pipe major of the Queen’s Own Cameron
Highlanders, recently seen on the Champs Elysees, had time to call to
his fellow-countrymen,
‘Let’s gie the lad a blaw’, and the band responded with alacrity with ‘The Campbells are coming’.
The
story of Eric Liddell’s Sabbatarian principles were well
known; he would not run on a Sunday, the day set aside by God; as a
result, he would not run the Olympic 100m, won by his inferior, the
Englishman Harold Abrahams.
The G.B team had trainers and
physios; one of them, sympathetic to Liddell’s principles, had
handed him a paraphrased text from First Samuel 2: 30 as he went out to
run:-
“As the old book says, ‘he who honours me, him will I honour’”.
Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service:
 From
the outside lane, in a less than familiar event, but a thrilling
Olympic final, Eric Liddell, the Flying Scotsman, won the Olympic gold
medal in a new World record- he had run the first half fast as fast as
he could, and then, with God’s help, he had run the second half
faster -he had honoured God in his own way, and God had honoured him.
Next
day, the Sunday, he honoured God again by preaching the sermon at the
Scots Kirk in Paris – his text was ‘they were swifter than
eagles, they were stronger than lions’- and he returned to
Waverly station in Edinburgh to an adoring throng -the station
was mobbed. Six days later, as he graduated B.Sc. from Edinburgh
University, his principal quipped, ‘You have shown that none can
pass you but the examiner’.
Eric spent a year at Divinity
College, and when he preached, the churches were packed, with
congregations squeezing onto the pulpit steps to hear him. His career
seemed set- and what was that career?
Was it parish ministry?
No- he was to follow his father, and his brother Rob, in working for the London Missionary Society in China.
When
he left Waverly Station, it was again packed, as it had been for his
Olympic ovation. An eyewitness reported that Liddell himself started
Hymn 470: Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does its successive
journeys run.
The Mission Field, Tientsin:
 Eric
travelled by the Trans-Siberian Railway to Tientsin in Northern China.
There he raised funds for a running track considered one of the finest
tracks in Asia, but this was only a small part of his great legacy in
the mission field.
When China was invaded, and Britons
interned after the Sino-Japanese war, Liddell was among them. Having
sent his pregnant wife and two daughters to safety in Canada, he set
about becoming a teacher in the camp.
To stop the children
fighting, he refereed hockey matches, mending the hockey sticks with
fish glue during the night; he made baseballs from scraps of curtains
and sheets; all in all, he became a surrogate father to many children
in the camp, and was universally loved.
He twice refused
repatriation; he firstly gave his place up to an expectant mother; you
may be surprised to hear secondly that Sir Winston Churchill himself
attempted to broker Eric’s release.
And it’s
not a happy ending - Eric Liddell died in the camp in February 1945 of
a brain tumour; the children he had nurtured in the camp became his
cord bearers when he was buried beneath the snow in northern China, his
grave marked by a simple wooden cross, his name spelt out in boot
polish.
For 45 years Liddell’s grave lay unknown; then it
was moved to the Mausoleum of Martyrs southwest of Beijing to the last
resting place of those considered to have given their lives for China.
Few foreigners, and even fewer Christians, have been accorded such an
honour in Communist China.
There’s a post-script: Allan
Wells, the new Flying Scot, when interviewed by the BBC in 1980 after
winning the Olympic 100m in Moscow, was asked, ‘Were you thinking
of Harold Abrahams as you crossed the line?’ My old team
mate, always quick on his feet, replied, to the delight of the entire
Scottish Athletics community,
‘No, I was thinking of Eric Liddell, actually’.
Allan
Wells, a Boys’ Brigader to his bone marrow, was familiar with
John Keddie’s stories of Eric. Dr. Stephanie Cook of Ayrshire,
the Olympic Modern Pentathlon Champion, when still a
cross-country runner at Oxford, was given a copy of Sally
Magnusson’s Eric Liddell biography inscribed, ‘To the
Flying Scotswoman’.
At the Sydney Olympics, lying in eighth
place after the swimming, shooting, fencing and show jumping, she won
the gold with a brilliant cross-country run.
A year later she added the world title, and promptly retired.
Two
days later Dr Cook flew to ravaged Gujarat with Merlin, the medical
charity – her inspiration, she said, had been Eric Liddell; and
like him she had chosen a life of service to her Lord and Master.
It’s quite a thought, and quite a legacy.
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