Prologue The Last Race of the Champion Weihsien, Shandong Province, China, 1944 He is crouching on the start line, which has been scratched out with a stick across the parched earth. His upper body is thrust slightly forward and his arms are bent at the elbow. His left leg is planted ahead of the right, the heels of both feet raised slightly in preparation for a springy launch. Exactly two decades earlier, he had won his Olympic title in the hot, shallow bowl of Paris''s Colombes Stadium. Afterward, the crowd in the yellow-painted grandstands gave him the longest and loudest ovation of those Games. What inspired them was not only his roaring performance, but also the element of sacrificial romance wound into his personal story, which unfolded in front of them like the plot of some thunderous novel. Now, trapped in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, the internees have teemed out of the low dormitories and the camp''s bell tower to line the route of the makeshift course to see Eric Liddell again. Even the guards in the watchtowers peer down eagerly at the scene.
In Paris, Liddell ran on a track of crimson cinder. In Weihsien, he will compete along dusty pathways, which the prisoners have named to remind them nostalgically of faraway home: Main Street, Sunset Boulevard, Tin Pan Alley. Liddell claimed his gold medal in a snow-white singlet, his country''s flag across his chest. Here he wears a shirt cut from patterned kitchen curtains, baggy khaki shorts, which are grubby and drop to the knee, and a pair of gray canvas "spikes," almost identical to those he''d used during the Olympics. As surreal as it seems, "Sports Days" such as this one are an established feature of the camp. For the internees, it is a way of forgetting--for a few hours at least--the reality of incarceration; a prisoner wistfully calls each of them "a speck of glitter amid the dull monotony." Even though he is over forty years old, practically bald, and pitifully thin, Liddell is the marquee attraction. Those who don''t run want to watch him.
Those who do want to beat him. Though spread over sixty thousand square miles, the coastal province of Shandong, tucked into the eastern edge of China''s north plain, looks minuscule on maps of that immense country. Weihsien is barely a pencil dot within Shandong. And the camp itself is merely a speck within that--a roll of land of approximately three acres, roughly the size of two football pitches. Caught in both the vastness of China and also the grim mechanism of the Second World War, which seems without respite let alone end, the internees had begun to think of themselves as forsaken. Until the Red Cross at last got food parcels to them in July, there were those who feared the slow, slow death of starvation. Weight fell off everyone. Some lost 15 pounds or more, including Liddell.
He dropped from 160 pounds to around 130. Others, noticeably corpulent on entering Weihsien, shed over 80 pounds and looked like lost souls in worn clothes. Morale sagged, a black depression ringing the camp as high as its walls. Those parcels meant life. While hunger stalked the camp, no one had the fuel or the inclination to run. So this race is a celebration, allowing the internees to express their relief at finally being fed. Liddell shouldn''t be running in it. Ever since late spring-cum-early summer he''s felt weary and strangely disconnected.
His walk has slowed. His speech has slowed too. He''s begun to do things ponderously and is sleeping only fitfully, the tiredness burrowing into his bones. He is stoop-shouldered. Mild dizzy spells cloud some of his days. Sometimes his vision is blurred. Though desperately sick, he casually dismisses his symptoms as "nothing to worry about," blaming them on overwork. Throughout the eighteen months he''s already spent in Weihsien, Liddell has been a reassuring presence, always representing hope.
He has toiled as if attempting to prove that perpetual motion is actually possible. He rises before dawn and labors until curfew at ten p.m. Liddell is always doing something; and always doing it for others rather than for himself. He scrabbles for coal, which he carries in metal pails. He chops wood and totes bulky flour sacks. He cooks in the kitchens. He cleans and sweeps.
He repairs whatever needs fixing. He teaches science to the children and teenagers of the camp and coaches them in sports too. He counsels and consoles the adults, who bring him their worries. Every Sunday he preaches in the church. Even when he works the hardest, Liddell still apologizes fornot working hard enough. The internees are so accustomed to his industriousness that no one pays much attention to it anymore; familiarity has allowed the camp to take both it and him a little for granted. Since Liddell first became public property--always walking in the arc light of fame--wherever he went and whatever he did or had once done was brightly illuminated. The son of Scots missionaries who was born, shortly after the twentieth century began, in the port of Tientsin.
The sprinter whose locomotive speed inspired newspapers to call him "The Flying Scotsman." The devout Christian who preached in congregational churches and meeting halls about scripture, temperance, morality, and Sunday observance. The Olympic champion who abandoned the track for the sake of his religious calling in China. The husband who booked boat passages for his pregnant wife and two infant daughters to enable them to escape the torment he was enduring in Weihsien. The father who had never met his third child, born without him at her bedside. The friend and colleague, so humbly modest, who treated everyone equally. The internees assume nothing will harm such a good man; especially someone who is giving so much to them. And none of them has registered his deteriorating physical condition because he and everyone around him look too much alike to make his illness conspicuous.
Anyone else would find an excuse not to race. Liddell, however, doesn''t have it in him to back out. He is too conscientious. The camp expects him to compete, and he won''t let them down, however much the effort drains him and however shaky his legs feel. He is playing along with his role as Weihsien''s breezy optimist, a front concealing his distress. Every few weeks he merely slits a new notch-hole into the leather of his black belt and then pulls it tightly around his ever-shrinking waistline. Liddell makes only one concession. Previously he has been scrupulously fair about leveling the field.
He''s always started several yards behind the other runners, giving them an outside chance of beating him. This time there is no such handicap for him; that alone should alert everyone to the fact he is ailing. Liddell says nothing about it. Instead, he takes his place, without pause or protest, in a pack of a dozen other runners, his eyes fixed on nothing but the narrow strip of land that constitutes the front straight. The starter climbs onto an upturned packing crate, holding a white handkerchief aloft in his right hand. And then he barks out the three words Liddell has heard countless times in countless places: Ready . Set . Go.
Weifang, Shandong Province, China Present Day He is waiting for me at the main gate on Guang-Wen Street. He is dressed smartly and formally: white shirt, dark tie, and an even darker suit, the lapels wide and well cut. He looks like someone about to make a speech or take a business meeting. His blond hair is impeccably combed back, revealing a high widow''s peak. There''s the beginning of a smile on his slender lips, as if he knows a secret the rest of us don''t and is about to share it. Barely a wrinkle or a crease blemishes his pale skin, and his eyes are brightly alert. He is a handsome, eager fellow, still blazing with life. On this warm spring morning, I am looking directly into Eric Liddell''s face.
He''s preserved in his absolute pomp, his photograph pressed onto a big square of metal. It is attached to an iron pole as tall as a lamppost. This is a Communist homage to a Christian, a man China regards with paternal pride as its first Olympic champion. In Chinese eyes, he is a true son of their country; he belongs to no one else. More than seventy years have passed since Liddell came here. He''s never gone home. He''s never grown old. The place he knew as Weihsien is now called Weifang, the landscape unimaginably different.
Liddell arrived on a flatbed truck. He saw nothing but a huge checkerboard of field crops stretching to the black line of the horizon. Narrow dirt roads, along which horse-drawn carts rattled on wooden wheels, linked one flyspeck village to another. Each was primitively rural. I arrived on the sleek-nosed G-train from Beijing, a distance of three hundred miles covered in three rushing hours. What I saw were power stations with soot-lipped cooling towers, acres of coal spread around them like an oil slick, and the blackened, belching chimneys of factories. The city that needs this industrial muscle is the epitome of skyscraper modernity, a gleaming example of the new China built out of concrete and glass, steel and neon. Skeletal cranes are everywhere, always creating something taller than before.
These structures climb into a sky smothered in smog, the sun glimpsed only as a shadowed shape behind it. Guang-Wen Street is the bridge between this era and Liddell''s. When Liddell arrived in 1943, the locals, living as though time had stopped a century before, parked handheld barrows on whichever pitch suited them and bartered over homegrown vegetables, bolts of cloth, and tin pots.