I WILL HONOR THOSE WHO HONOR ME!

Eric Henry Liddell (16 January 1902 – 21 February 1945, Chinese:; pinyin: āilǐkè Lìdéĕr) was a Scottish athlete, rugby union international and missionary. His surname is pronounced /lɪdəl/ and rhymes with fiddle.
Liddell was the winner of the Men's 400 metres at the 1924 Summer Olympics held in Paris. He was portrayed in the film Chariots of Fire.



Born in China, Liddell returned there as a Protestant missionary in later life.




Eric Liddell, often called the "Flying Scotsman" after the record breaking locomotive, was born in Tianjin (formerly transliterated as Tientsin) (Chinese) in North China, second son of the Rev & Mrs James Dunlop Liddell who were Scottish missionaries with the London Missionary Society. Liddell was born in 1902 and went to school in China until the age of five. At the age of six, he and his brother Robert, eight years old, were enrolled in Eltham College, Mottingham, a boarding school in England for the sons of missionaries. Their parents and sister Jenny returned to China. During the boys' time at Eltham their parents, sister and new brother Ernest came home on furlough two or three times and were able to be together as a family - mainly living in Edinburgh.


At Eltham, Liddell was an outstanding sportsman, being awarded the Blackheath Cup as the best athlete of his year, playing for the First XI and the First XV by the age of 15, later becoming captain of both the cricket and rugby union teams. His headmaster described him as being 'entirely without vanity'.
Eric Liddell became well-known for being the fastest runner in Scotland while at Eltham College. Newspapers carried the stories of his successful track meets. Many articles stated that he was a potential Olympic winner, and no one from their country had ever won a gold medal before.


Liddell was chosen to speak for Glasgow Students' Evangelical Union (GSEU) because he was a strong Christian. The GSEU hoped that he would draw large crowds, so that many people would hear the Gospel. The GSEU would send out a group of eight to ten men to an area where they would stay with the local population. It was Liddell's job to be the lead speaker and to evangelize the men of Scotland

Paris Olympics

During the summer of 1924, the Olympics were hosted by the city of Paris. Liddell was a committed Christian and refused to run on Sunday (the Christian Sabbath), with the consequence that he was forced to withdraw from the 100 metres race, his best event.During this time he was preaching in a nearby church in Paris. The schedule had been published several months earlier, and his decision was made well before the Games began. Liddell spent the intervening months training for the 400 metres, an event in which he had previously excelled. Even so, his success in the 400m was largely unexpected. The day of 400 metres race came, and as Liddell went to the starting blocks, an American masseur slipped a piece of paper into Liddell's hand with a quotation from 1 Samuel 2:30, "Those who honour me I will honour." Liddell ran with that piece of paper in his hand. He not only won the race, but broke the existing world record with a time of 47.6 seconds. A few days earlier Liddell had competed in the 200 metre finals, for which he received the bronze medal behind Americans Jackson Scholz and Charles Paddock, beating Harold Abrahams, who finished in sixth place. (This was the second and last race in which these two runners met.)
His performance in the 400 metres in Paris remained a world record for four years, and a European record for 12 years, until it was beaten by another British athlete, Godfrey Brown, at the Berlin Olympics.
After the Olympics and his graduation, Liddell continued to compete. Shortly after the 1924 Olympics, his final leg on the 4 x 400 metres race in a British Empire vs. USA contest helped secure the victory. A year later, in 1925, at the Scottish Amateur Athletics Association (AAA) meeting in Hampden Park in Glasgow, he equalled his own Scottish championship record of 10.0 seconds in the 100 yards, won the 220 yard contest in 22.2 seconds, won the 440 yard contest in 47.7, and participated in a winning relay team. He was only the fourth athlete ever to have won all three sprints at the SAAA, achieving this feat twice: in 1924 and 1925.
Because of his birth and death in the country some of China's Olympic literature lists the Scotsman as China's first Olympic champion.




After that he went to North China in 1925-1943 and became a Missionary.In 1943 he was imprisoned,In his last while he was in hospital he said to the nurse that his commitment is a “Complete commitment to the Lord”.