Eric Liddell's Final Race

In 1924, Eric Liddell stunned the world by refusing to run his best event at the Paris Olympics because the heats fell on a Sunday. He ran the 400 meters instead — and won gold. Scotland celebrated him as a national hero. Fame, fortune, and comfort were his for the taking.

Liddell walked away from all of it.

By 1925, he was back in China, where he had been born to missionary parents, teaching science and Bible classes in Tianjin. For nearly twenty years he poured himself out for the Chinese people. When Japan invaded and the situation grew desperate, the British government arranged evacuation for its citizens. Liddell sent his pregnant wife and daughters to safety in Canada but stayed behind to serve the Chinese students and villagers who had no escape route.

He was eventually interned at the Weihsien prison camp in Shandong Province. Even there, he organized games for children, tutored teenagers, and carried coal for the elderly. Fellow prisoners called him the most Christlike man they had ever met. He died of a brain tumor in that camp on February 21, 1945 — five months before liberation.