Sixty years before shooter Xu Haifeng fired himself into the record books as China’s first Olympic champion, another Chinese-born athlete raced, with little less fanfare, to a gold medal at the 1924 Games. Eric Liddell, best known as the subject of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, was born in the north Chinese port city Tianjin in 1902 and died in a Japanese internment camp in China in 1945 after following his parents into missionary work there.

John Keddie, who has written a new biography of the Scot, believes there might be a case for calling Liddell China’s first Olympic champion even though he ran for Britain when he won 400 metres gold at the Paris Olympics.

He was born in China, he died in China, he helped the Chinese people and he had a great love for China, it really was his frame of reference in his life, he said.

These things endear him to the Chinese even though in principle there is a hesitancy about making a hero of someone who was a Christian missionary. That hesitancy reflects bitterness over the role of missionaries, who were often seen by many Chinese and by Western officials as harbingers of colonial control throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

As a church minister and an authority on Scottish athletics, Keddie himself was used as a reference-point for the character of Liddell by the screenwriter of the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire.

The film told how Liddell, Scotland’s finest sprinter, skipped his favoured 100 m because his religious convictions forbade him from running on a Sunday. Rather than not compete at all, Liddell elected to take part in the 200, where he won bronze, and, famously, the 400.

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