Chariots Return! Mark Ryan's new book is a winner
When David Puttnam dined quietly with Nigel Havers in February this year, it was a poignant moment for lovers of athletics and film alike. “We're the last two left alive. Just me and Nigel. Only us left, now,” Lord Puttnam observed.
He was of course referring to the Chariots of Fire family, or at least the main protagonists therein. The leading actors have died, as have musical genius Vangelis and brilliant director Hugh Hudson.
But a new book reveals just how relevant the Chariots story remains, in this centenary year of Paris Olympic Games.
Chariots of Fire producer Puttnam has helped with the book, as has World Athletics President Seb Coe and Sir Brendan Foster.
There are revelations aplenty in what becomes a dramatic journey through Olympic history, romance, war, death and legacy. If you love athletics, this one is for you.
The author Mark Ryan wrote the excellent Running with Fire: The True Story of Chariots of Fire Hero Harold Abrahams in 2011. And now, in Chariots Return – Saving the Soul of the Games, he revisits the lives of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, exploding a number of myths along the way.
According to history, Harold Abrahams was a superb sprinting technician and Eric Liddell was technically ragged. But Ryan contends that in their key Olympic finals it was possibly the other way around.
Photographs in the book show Abrahams failing to remain low in early strides of the Olympic 100m final. "Abrahams is already almost vertical," says Ryan. "He has stood up too soon but luckily he has the athleticism to recover from his technical error, having made an even more disastrous start in the semi-final when he assumed a false start would be called."
Similarly, photographs in the book illustrate that Liddell's famously flailing arms were not apparent in the Olympic final. "It's true he often lost discipline with his arm action," says Ryan. "But when he really needed a strong arm action, in the 1924 400m Olympic final, he was practically text-book with his arms. He only drops and flails his arms when he knows he has won!"
There is also a widely held view that Abrahams was a stick-in-the-mud, the archetypal ‘blazerati’. But Ryan instead makes a strong argument to suggest Abrahams was a visionary who foresaw the future of the Olympic Games before anyone else and continued to fight to his grave for the purity and sportsmanship of the Games.
Ryan also shines new light on the possible cause of Liddell’s death. Again, history tells us he died from a brain tumour in an internment camp in China aged 43. But Ryan has a theory that this may have been caused by a blow to the head when he was swimming in a sea infested with jellyfish.
Remarkably, Ryan says Liddell’s head may have been mistaken for one of the jellyfish when a young missionary bashed him with a stick. What’s more, Ryan says Liddell did not give up running when he went to China to be a missionary and had the potential to win Olympic titles in 1928 and 1932.
On the Oscar-winning movie itself, Ryan says the iconic musical score almost didn’t make the cut. “The soaring music we all know and love,” says Ryan, “almost came too late!”
In a book full of revelations, there is also a story about a discarded ending that was considered too anticlimactic with the characters Aubrey and Lord Lindsay stopping to watch a clip from the 1980 Moscow Olympics outside a TV rental shop. “A bit different from our day, old chap,” Lindsay says.
READ MORE: AW's original Chariots of Fire movie review
Well written, brilliantly researched and packed with historical information and anecdotes, this fine book beautifully marks the 100th anniversary of those ‘Chariots of Fire Games’.
It is a timely publication, too, as not only does it coincide with this year's Paris Olympics but it has been released at the same time that World Athletics chose to posthumously award one of its Heritage plaques to Liddell's niece, Susan Liddell Caton, at the recent World Indoor Championships in Glasgow.
» Chariots Return by Mark Ryan is available from book-mark.co.uk for £22
