Harold Abrahams Comparison Essay

This essay is about how Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams differed. Do you know who were the two athletes who gave up their fame for something else unimportant? Well, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams were those people. They were both great athletes and sometimes quite similar to each other, but differed vastly. They differed in what they did during their spare time, motivation and faith. The strong point was how they spent their spare time; my weakest point was going to be motivation and my strongest to be faith. Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams inspired the movie ‘Chariots of Fire’ by Hugh Hudson.

Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams differed in their use of spare time. Liddell does have a lot of spare time and spent it wisely like: preaching, writing letters to his parents and running for God. In the movie, Chariots of Fire, at the beginning, Liddell was writing a letter to his parents, who were probably in China (Hudson 1981). On the other hand, Harold Abrahams was a great athlete (like Liddell) and he spent his spare time singing inside a choir in church, running (for his family, his university and his country) and dating his fiancée, Sybil.(Hudson 1981) In the middle of the movie, he revealed himself as a Jew to her. Thus, this tells us that Liddell used his time mostly to please God while Abrahams,

Eric Liddell’s motivation was run in God’s name or God’s sake. He wanted to feel God’s pleasure while he was preaching in the rain. Harold Abrahams also wanted all the glory for himself for he was arrogant and he said that he ran for his family, university and country. He was loyal, but as said, arrogant. He said that with pride when he told some people (perhaps the professors) from his university, Cambridge University. To sum up, Liddell honours God by running in his name, since God has given him the gift of fame and speed while God has also given Abrahams the same thing, but he did not appreciate