We were sitting in a corner cafe in Rathmines on Thursday evening and David Puttnam was telling me why he thinks Chariots of Fire still holds up so magnificently more than four decades after its first theatrical release, in May 1981. And with that he soon gets to the core of why some Olympic stories will never grow old.
It also happened to be exactly 100 years to the day since one of his film’s central characters, Eric Liddell, won the 400m at those Paris Olympics – on July 11th, 1924 – after refusing to run the 100m, his speciality, because the heats took place on a Sunday. As a devout Christian, there was no way Liddell would compete on the Sabbath.
“It was absolutely that,” Puttnam says of the film’s original hook, at age 83 still mightily enthusiastic about it all. “We realised early on that Liddell’s story on its own was not a film, so that’s when Harold Abrahams came in. And in fact there was originally a third guy, Douglas Lowe, who won the 800m in 1924, but declined to have anything to do with the film.
“The Abrahams character was equally important, because of the anti-Semitism in sport at the time. It also says things, quick subtly, about race and prejudice, with Abrahams getting the last laugh over the establishment, and Liddell too, when he says to the Prince of Wales that what’s wrong here is you’re asking a man to argue with his own conscience.”
To mark the centenary of that film’s experience, and the Olympics now returning to Paris 100 years after Ireland first competed as an independent Free State, the British embassy in Dublin hosted a special screening of Chariots of Fire later that evening, around the corner at the Stella Cinema. Time was soon running back.
From the opening scene which gently fades from the 1978 funeral service for Abrahams and cuts back to Liddell and his fellow 1924 British Olympians running down the West Sands at St Andrews, backed by the first timeless keys of the Vangelis soundtrack, the film is indeed still a visual and emotional masterpiece.
Puttnam had travelled up earlier on Thursday from his home in Skibbereen, along with his wife, Patsy. Chariots of Fire is my all-time favourite film about running, and we’d previously spoken at length about how he pulled it together against all the odds. (“Time after time, for every crisis, we found a resolution.”)
[ ‘What the film says is that you can hold on to your principles, and still emerge a winner’ ]
Chariots of Fire also went on to receive seven Oscar nominations and win four, including the best picture award, which goes to Puttnam as the film’s producer.
The film was conceived by Puttnam in 1978, while he was holed up with the flu in a rented house in Los Angeles and chanced upon Liddell’s story in an Olympic reference book. He was looking for something along the lines of A Man for All Seasons, or someone who follows his conscience. And if Liddell was the original inspiration, Abrahams fit neatly too, as in Liddell’s absence he went on to win the 100m in Paris.
Abrahams and Liddell were also two runners of different backgrounds and motivations; one considered British-Jewish, the other Scottish Protestant, sharing only the same lofty ambition and cavalier spirit.
While staying largely loyal to their experiences at those 1924 Olympics – and truth is at the heart of it – the film occasionally flashes its dramatic licence. Liddell was indeed a devout Christian, withdrawing from the 100m because he would not run on a Sunday. However, he didn’t find that out for the first time when boarding the boat for Paris, as portrayed in the film; he’d learned that some six months in advance, long before his switch to the 400m.
Nor did Abrahams race around the great courtyard at Trinity College at Cambridge (it was Lord Burghley). And while his winning 100m in 1924 against the odds is entirely accurate, it wasn’t a race of truth after his failure in the 200m. The 100m, in fact, preceded the 200m. It takes nothing from the point of their story.
Earlier on Thursday, Team Ireland announced the track and field team of 23 athletes for Paris later this month, and a quick glance through some of the names brought a reminder of the many obstacles they had to overcome, in their own different way, while sticking to their belief and principles that it would all come good in the end.
Athletes such as Sharlene Mawdsley, who was left behind from the delayed Tokyo Games three years ago, despite helping the mixed 4x400m relay secure qualification. That experience may have disheartened many, but Mawdsley set herself higher ambitions to also qualify for Paris in the individual 400m – “I wasn’t leaving that unturned this year” – and her time has now come.
Sarah Lavin has already overcome several obstacles of a different sort to make her second Olympics in the 100m hurdles, and more recently Phil Healy did too, missing the World Athletics Championships last year with Hashimoto’s disease, a thyroid gland disorder which left her unable to train or race.
Healy found herself repeatedly contemplating retiring, but something inside of her kept driving her on to Paris. The same with Luke McCann, the 1,500m runner who last December sustained a sacral stress fracture, ruling out any sort of running until the end of March, and an apparent roadblock to his Olympic dream. Three months later, McCann ran 3:33.66 in Stockholm, and at age 26 he’s now Paris-bound along with his sister Jodie, who qualified in the women’s 5,000m.
“I think the other thing about Chariots is the film will still find you out,” Puttnam says. “It has a way of sussing you out. It is saying to you, ‘you too could be like this ...’ And you momentarily think ‘yeah, I could’.
“But are you really committed? Or do you wish you were? Do you wish you were Abrahams able to tell the establishment to f*** off? Do you wish you were Liddell telling the Prince of Wales ‘no’? Because that’s our inner selves, and I think every Olympic Games can still throw up stories not dissimilar, no matter how professional it feels.
“I live on the river in Skibbereen, a tiny community of 1,700 people, and a rowing club with 200 people. Look at what Paul O’Donovan is trying to achieve in Paris now, going for his third Olympic medal.
“There will always be athletes who just defy every form of expectation. And I think that’s something to still cling on to.”
And still at the core of why some Olympic stories will never grow old.
