The opportunity to work again with EE, to sit across the desk from him and pore over books and video notes and other research, to read the numerous accounts of EL’s life, to speak on the phone with Eric Liddell’s daughter, Patricia, on several occasions (oh, her patience in talking with me!), and to take the moments in Eric Liddell’s life and weave my artistic thread through their fabric (and to do so from only his point of view) has been more than a project for me. This manuscript has changed my life. It has changed my walk with God.
This is a biography. We wanted to maintain the factual integrity of a traditional biography while also making the book readable and understandable. We wanted to make Eric Liddell’s presence more immediate and relatable to readers. So each chapter begins with a fictionalized snapshot from Eric’s life based on true history but told using the conventions of fiction. Obviously, when fictionalizing someone’s life, writers don’t know exactly what happened (Was it really raining? Did he really eat roast beef that night for dinner?), but I have tried to stay as close as possible to what we do know for certain and to enhance that part of the story to help draw readers into the life of a truly remarkable human being. My prayer is that, like EE and myself, you will come to feel that you actually know Eric Liddell . . . and that running this part of the race alongside him will make your journey with Christ that much more precious.
Eva Marie Everson
PROLOGUE
OUR RACE
ALMOST A FULL CENTURY HAS passed since Eric Liddell’s running career began and his renown caught fire. Once he made his decision to withdraw from the 1924 Olympics 100-meter event due to religious observance, his iconic legacy was seared in time.
A prized favorite to win gold for Britain, his name was dragged through the homeland mud on the heels of his announcement. Yet Liddell navigated gold-medal glory via a different route, the 400 meters, a distance with which he had minimal experience.
Against all odds, he ran victoriously and in the process inspired millions. In so doing he preserved his routine commitment of honoring God by resting on the Sabbath and provided a rapturous reason for Britain to celebrate. The flame that had been lit beneath his celebrity exploded throughout the world.
Eric’s incredible display of faith during the Olympics was just the beginning. He had another race in his life yet to run—a more important one, with a much greater prize. This final race of faith was not marked out using the familiar lines of a track. He did not know where it would end. He could not have imagined how his world would be torn apart before it was all over. And he certainly couldn’t have fathomed the magnificent extent of how God would continue to use him in the generations that would follow. All Eric could do was prepare day by day and by faith run his race to the best of his abilities. He ran in his own unique theological lane as he persevered through hardships and ultimately achieved the everlasting crown of righteousness.
Many glowing embers of Eric Liddell’s example remain today. They serve as luminaries for the race we have yet to run, and indeed are running—the race of faith in Christ Jesus. The baton of Christian faith has been passed to us. We don’t know what our next century will bring or what tumult lurks around dark cultural turns. We can’t know for certain what we will be asked to do. But we can prepare, as Eric did, in the days of comfort. Then when our days of hardship come, we’ll be ready to meet them—so that we, too, might not run aimlessly but in order to win the prize.
Eric Liddell was prepared to run his final race of faith. Are we prepared for ours?
CHAPTER 1
ANOTHER RACE
A man’s pride will bring him low, but a humble spirit will obtain honor.
Proverbs 29:23, NASB
July 19, 1924
Journalists crowded London’s King’s Cross railway station platform like hunters in midstalk. They milled around, searching the faces of passengers urgently headed toward their respective train compartments. Their office-issued pads and nubby No. 2 pencils were poised to jot down the perfect quote, which by morning’s print—and with the right framing—would become the next sports page headline. Cameramen, not to be outdone, vied from equal vantage points. They readied their flashbulbs in hope of seizing their unsuspecting victim and, in doing so, capturing their prize—an exclusive photograph of the nation’s most recently crowned hero.
They had not been so lucky earlier that warm Saturday afternoon at the Stamford Bridge track, where a special relays meet between the British Empire and the United States of America had been held. Eric Liddell, the newly minted 400-meter gold-medal champion, was to run in the relay, only a week into his Olympic glory. Because his medal still had not arrived by mail, the sheen of his athleticism had yet to hang around his neck.
In the whirlwind seven days since breaking the world record in the 400 meters, Eric had received his bachelor of science from the University of Edinburgh, had been capped ceremoniously by Sir Alfred Ewing with a crown of oleaster sprigs, and had been carried out of McEwan Hall by his fellow classmates. He had given speeches, been honored at a dinner, and then made his way by train to London and Stamford Bridge. There, surrounded by a stadium built to hold more than forty thousand spectators, he and Horatio Fitch (Britain’s and the United States’ best sprinters, respectively) waited for their teammates to hand them the baton for the final 400-meter leg of the mile relay.
This race was the last event of the meet, and Britain was starved for some homeland firepower near
