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The athlete Eric Liddell is the man whose story was immortalised | 0:00:10 | 0:00:13 | |
in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:15 | |
A strict Christian, he refused to run in the 100m | 0:00:15 | 0:00:17 | |
at the Paris Olympics in 1924 because the race | 0:00:17 | 0:00:19 | |
was being held on a Sunday. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:28 | |
He went on, however, to produce an astonishing performance | 0:00:28 | 0:00:30 | |
in the 400m, to win gold and become a national hero. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:33 | |
But a new book shows that was only part of his extraordinary life. | 0:00:33 | 0:00:36 | |
For The Glory is the work of Duncan Hamilton, | 0:00:36 | 0:00:38 | |
who is a former journalist and an award-winning sports writer. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:43 | |
Duncan Hamilton, this is a story that we think | 0:00:57 | 0:00:59 | |
we know from Chariots of Fire. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:01 | |
What was it that made you want to dig deeper? | 0:01:01 | 0:01:07 | |
I think it was basically I wanted to know what happened next. | 0:01:07 | 0:01:09 | |
If you remember, Chariots of Fire ends, simply saying that he had died | 0:01:09 | 0:01:13 | |
in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. | 0:01:13 | 0:01:15 | |
And, of course, Chariots of Fire goes up only to 1924 | 0:01:15 | 0:01:21 | |
and Eric Liddell died in 1945, so there was an awful lot | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
of space to go and look at. | 0:01:24 | 0:01:29 | |
We will look at it in a minute, but first of all, let us go back | 0:01:29 | 0:01:32 | |
to 1924 and those Olympics in Paris. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:35 | |
Here is a man who decides he is not going to run the 100m on a Sunday, | 0:01:35 | 0:01:39 | |
but then goes on to win gold in the 400m. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:43 | |
I think it is worth reminding us what an extraordinary | 0:01:43 | 0:01:45 | |
achievement that was. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:48 | |
It was, because he couldn't really train for the 400 metres | 0:01:48 | 0:01:51 | |
until the spring of that year. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:53 | |
He only had about half a dozen races before he went to Paris | 0:01:53 | 0:01:57 | |
and he was given absolutely no chance of winning. | 0:01:57 | 0:02:03 | |
The British Olympic Association were very confident | 0:02:03 | 0:02:05 | |
that he would change his mind and that he would run on a Sunday. | 0:02:05 | 0:02:10 | |
What I found out was that, even six weeks before the race, | 0:02:10 | 0:02:14 | |
they were still saying that he would race, in the 100 metres. | 0:02:14 | 0:02:19 | |
He was there, in their official team. | 0:02:19 | 0:02:22 | |
He wasn't in the 400 metres. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:27 | |
I mean, one of the things that people don't realise | 0:02:27 | 0:02:29 | |
is that he had his own trainer, which isn't mentioned | 0:02:29 | 0:02:32 | |
in Chariots of Fire. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:34 | |
And he did a tremendous amount of work with him. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:37 | |
He got him ready. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:40 | |
And the performance that he kind of put on was fabulous. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:44 | |
He won well? | 0:02:44 | 0:02:45 | |
Yes, it was a world-record time. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:51 | |
And I think, also, what people tend to forget is that, had he raced | 0:02:51 | 0:02:54 | |
again, in 1928 in Amsterdam, he would surely have | 0:02:54 | 0:02:56 | |
won gold there, too. | 0:02:56 | 0:03:00 | |
He had this very unorthodox running style. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:03 | |
His great rival Harold Abrahams called him the human spider? | 0:03:03 | 0:03:08 | |
He ran with his head up, so he wasn't looking at the track, | 0:03:08 | 0:03:11 | |
he was looking at the sky, really. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:15 | |
Great Britain appointed a team manager who was also | 0:03:15 | 0:03:17 | |
a part-time journalist. | 0:03:17 | 0:03:21 | |
And if you read some of his articles in the weeks before the Olympics, | 0:03:21 | 0:03:25 | |
literally, only a fortnight beforehand, he is effectively | 0:03:25 | 0:03:27 | |
saying that he has got the wrong running style, | 0:03:27 | 0:03:30 | |
and that he just won't win a single solitary button. | 0:03:30 | 0:03:36 | |
So, afterwards, Eric Liddell could really have been nasty | 0:03:36 | 0:03:40 | |
about it but of course, he just wasn't that kind of person. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:43 | |
He just won his gold medal. Afterwards, he went to a tea dance, | 0:03:43 | 0:03:48 | |
on the Champs-Elysees, and that was it. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:54 | |
So here's this man, he has got the world at his feet | 0:03:54 | 0:03:57 | |
and he turned his back on athletics. | 0:03:57 | 0:03:59 | |
He decides to dedicate his life to the church. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:01 | |
He becomes a missionary and he goes to China. | 0:04:01 | 0:04:03 | |
What was it about this period of his life that | 0:04:03 | 0:04:05 | |
particularly fascinated you? | 0:04:05 | 0:04:09 | |
I think it was the fact that China was a very primitive country then. | 0:04:09 | 0:04:15 | |
When you think about it, in terms of the number | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
of missionaries murdered, on the very day he left, | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
The Times was reporting about another missionary murder. | 0:04:20 | 0:04:30 | |
They could have virtually kept that set in their type, | 0:04:32 | 0:04:34 | |
because virtually every fortnight, for the next 15 or 16 years, | 0:04:34 | 0:04:37 | |
there were missionaries murdered regularly. | 0:04:37 | 0:04:41 | |
It was a very dangerous place. There was the Nationalists, | 0:04:41 | 0:04:46 | |
the Communists, the guerillas, the warlords. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:50 | |
It was a bit like Game of Thrones, really. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:53 | |
China was in a complete state of flux. | 0:04:53 | 0:04:57 | |
And I think to go and be a missionary there, you really | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
needed to be a very, very brave person. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:06 | |
It is worth remembering the sacrifices that he made, | 0:05:06 | 0:05:10 | |
a family, ultimately. | 0:05:10 | 0:05:15 | |
He sent his wife Florence who was pregnant at the time | 0:05:15 | 0:05:17 | |
and their two children away from China back to Canada | 0:05:17 | 0:05:20 | |
where she was from and you dedicate the book to Florence, | 0:05:20 | 0:05:22 | |
why is that? | 0:05:22 | 0:05:23 | |
She was just a remarkable woman. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:26 | |
I think it must have been love at first sight or at least, | 0:05:26 | 0:05:30 | |
there must have been a fabulous bond there, really. | 0:05:30 | 0:05:40 | |
And for her to put up with the kind of missionary life. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:44 | |
He sent them off, thinking that he would probably join them | 0:05:44 | 0:05:47 | |
in about a year's time. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:48 | |
But then, of course, Pearl Harbor happened. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:50 | |
Japan entered the war. | 0:05:50 | 0:05:51 | |
They were already in China, fighting. | 0:05:51 | 0:06:01 | |
And he just found it impossible to get out. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:05 | |
And of course, he ended up in a prisoner of war camp? | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
He did. | 0:06:08 | 0:06:09 | |
That was around early 1943. | 0:06:09 | 0:06:10 | |
I went to the camp in China. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
There are still buildings left of it. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:16 | |
I think what amazed me the most is the size of it. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
It was so small. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:25 | |
There was a total of 2,100 people there throughout the three years | 0:06:25 | 0:06:28 | |
of its life and it was at its worst when he first went in. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:33 | |
There were 1,800 people living in a space that wasn't much bigger | 0:06:33 | 0:06:36 | |
than two football pitches. | 0:06:36 | 0:06:38 | |
And the conditions were appalling. | 0:06:38 | 0:06:44 | |
One thought kept reoccurring to me as I read this book, | 0:06:44 | 0:06:47 | |
this man Eric Liddell, he was almost too good to be true. | 0:06:47 | 0:06:50 | |
What did you make of him? | 0:06:50 | 0:06:56 | |
I was waiting for somebody to tell me something about him | 0:06:56 | 0:06:59 | |
that was a little fault. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:02 | |
But somebody once said of him that he was the closest thing | 0:07:02 | 0:07:07 | |
to a saint that they had ever met. | 0:07:07 | 0:07:09 | |
Somebody told me a tale, in the camp everybody was allocated | 0:07:09 | 0:07:11 | |
a particular job. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:12 | |
You were supposed to do your job, and keep yourself ready | 0:07:12 | 0:07:15 | |
for that job. | 0:07:15 | 0:07:20 | |
Whereas, she said she would see him walking around the camp | 0:07:20 | 0:07:22 | |
and he was doing other things too. | 0:07:22 | 0:07:26 | |
And he was never, never kind of rested. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
He never rested. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:31 | |
He just worked himself to the absolute bone. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:35 | |
And it was in the camp that he died, tragically just months | 0:07:35 | 0:07:38 | |
before it was liberated? | 0:07:38 | 0:07:40 | |
Yes, about six months before liberation, he had a brain tumour | 0:07:40 | 0:07:46 | |
and, sadly, the X-ray equipment that would have told him what he had, | 0:07:46 | 0:07:50 | |
only came into the camp, two weeks after he died. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:55 | |
But remarkably, he was running races in the camp. | 0:07:55 | 0:07:57 | |
Keeping morale up. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:07 | |
Finally, Eric Liddell, what would he make of athletics today? | 0:08:09 | 0:08:12 | |
I don't think he would compete in the Olympics nowadays. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:16 | |
I think he would be appalled by the drug-taking, | 0:08:16 | 0:08:18 | |
by the commercialism of it. | 0:08:18 | 0:08:21 | |
And I don't think that he would compete. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:24 | |
He would probably have found another sport, | 0:08:24 | 0:08:28 | |
I certainly don't think he would have been going | 0:08:28 | 0:08:30 | |
to Rio, for example. | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
Duncan Hamilton, thank you very much for coming in and talking to us | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
about For The Glory, The Life Of Eric Liddell. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:39 | |
It has been a pleasure. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:40 | |
Thanks. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:43 |