The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Eric Liddell
1902–1945 · Scottish
Refused to run on a Sunday, won Olympic gold in another race entirely, and died twenty years later in a Japanese internment camp in China.
The life
Eric Liddell was born in China to missionary parents, raised in Scotland, and was the fastest man in the country - a rugby international as well as a sprinter. When the 1924 Olympic schedule put the 100 metres heats on a Sunday, he withdrew from his best event and trained for the 400 instead, a distance he was not expected to win. He won it, in a world record.
Then he went back to China as a teacher, married Florence Mackenzie in Tianjin, and stayed on as the Japanese invasion closed in, sending his pregnant wife and daughters to safety in Canada in 1941 while he remained. Interned at Weihsien camp in 1943, he taught the children, refereed their games, carried coal for the elderly, and gave away his own rations. He died in the camp on 21 February 1945 of an undiagnosed brain tumour, five months before liberation, and never saw his youngest daughter.