Bannister’s time of 3
minutes, 59.4 seconds captured the world’s imagination and buoyed the spirits
of Britons still suffering through post-war austerity.
“It’s amazing that more
people have climbed Mount Everest than have broken the 4-minute mile,”
Bannister said in an
interview with The Associated Press in 2012.
Bannister followed up
his 4-minute milestone a few months later by beating Australia’s John Landy in
the “Miracle Mile” or “Mile of the Century” at the Empire Games in Vancouver,
British Columbia with both men going under 4 minutes. Bannister regarded that
as his greatest race because it came in a competitive championship against his
fiercest rival.
Bannister died
peacefully in Oxford on Saturday at the age of 88. He was “surrounded by his
family who were as loved by him, as he was loved by them,” the family said in a
statement Sunday. “He banked his treasure in the hearts of his friends.”
British Prime Minister
Theresa May remembered Bannister as a “British sporting icon whose achievements
were an inspiration to us all. He will be greatly missed.”
While he will forever
be remembered for his running, Bannister considered his long medical career in
neurology as his life’s greatest accomplishment.
“My medical work has
been my achievement and my family with 14 grandchildren,” he said. “Those are
real achievements.”
The quest to break the
4-minute mile carried a special mystique. The numbers were easy for the public
to grasp: 1 mile, 4 laps, 4 minutes.
When Sweden’s Gunder
Hagg ran 4:01.4 in 1945, the chase was truly on. But, time and again, runners
came up short. The 4-minute mark seemed like a brick wall that would never be
toppled.
Bannister was
undaunted.
“There was no logic in
my mind that if you can run a mile in 4 minutes, 1 and 2/5ths, you can’t run it
in 3:59,” he said. “I knew enough medicine and physiology to know it wasn’t a
physical barrier, but I think it had become a psychological barrier.”
Bannister was born on
March 23, 1929, in the London borough of Harrow. At the outbreak of World War
II, the family moved to the city of Bath, where Bannister sometimes ran to and
from school.
Bannister’s passion for
running took off in 1945 when his father took him to a track meet at London’s
White City Stadium, which was built to host the 1908 Olympics. They watched
British middle-distance star Sydney Wooderson, who had emerged as a rival to
the trio of Swedish runners who had taken the mile world record down close to
the 4-minute mark.
“I made up my mind then
when I got to Oxford, I would take up running seriously,” Bannister said.
As a first-year student
on an academic scholarship at Oxford, Bannister caught his coaches’ attention
while running as a pacemaker in a mile race on March 22, 1947. Instead of
dropping out of the race as pacers normally do, he kept running and beat the
field by 20 yards.
“I knew from this day
that I could develop this newfound ability,” he reflected in later life.
With the 1948 London
Olympics approaching, Bannister was running mile times of around 4:10. The
19-year-old was selected as a “possible” for the British Olympic team, but
decided he wasn’t ready and focused on preparing for the 1952 Helsinki Games.
By then, Bannister was
a full-time medical student and had to juggle his studies with his training. By
modern standards, his daily half-hour workout was remarkably light.
Bannister was
considered the favorite for the Helsinki gold in the 1,500 meters — the shorter
metric mile distance run in the Olympics. Just before the games, he learned
that organizers had added an extra round of heats, meaning he would have to run
on three consecutive days.
With his rhythm thrown
off, Bannister finished fourth in a final won by Josy Barthel of Luxembourg.
Had he won Olympic gold
that day, Bannister almost certainly would have retired. But, criticized by the
British media and disappointed in his own performance, he decided to keep
running, dedicating himself to beating the 4-minute mile and winning gold at
the ‘54 Empire Games.
By 1954, Hagg’s record
mile time had stood for nine years. Bannister, Landy and American miler Wes
Santee were all threatening to break the mark and it became a matter of who
would get there first.
“As it became clear
that somebody was going to do it, I felt that I would prefer it to be me,”
Bannister said in an AP interview.
He also wanted to
deliver something special for his country.
“I thought it would be
right for Britain to try to get this,” Bannister said in 2012. “There was a
feeling of patriotism. Our new queen had been crowned the year before, Everest
had been climbed in 1953. Although I tried in 1953, I broke the British record,
but not the 4-minute mile, and so everything was ready in 1954.”
Bannister scheduled his
attempt for May 6 during a meet between Oxford and the Amateur Athletic Union.
He started the day at the St. Mary’s Hospital lab in London, where he sharpened
his spikes and rubbed graphite on them so they wouldn’t pick up too much of the
track’s cinder ash. He took a midmorning train from Paddington Station to
Oxford.
The weather was dank
and miserable. Bannister’s Austrian coach, Franz Stampfl, told him this might
be his best chance. When the flag started to billow gently, he decided it was
now or never.
“I calculated there’s a
50-50 chance of my doing it,” Bannister recalled. “I said, ‘If there’s a 50-50
chance and I don’t take it, I may never get another chance to beat Landy to
it.’ So I said, ‘Let’s do it.”’
Bannister had lined up
English runners Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway as pacemakers. Brasher, a
steeplechaser, ran the first lap in 58 seconds and the first half-mile in 1:58.
Chataway moved to the front and took them through three laps in 3:01. Bannister
would have to run the final lap in 59 seconds.
He surged in front of
Chataway with about 300 yards to go.
“The world seemed to
stand still, or did not exist,” Bannister wrote in his book “The First Four
Minutes.” “The only reality was the next 200 yards of track under my feet. The
tape meant finality — extinction perhaps. I felt at that moment that it was my
chance to do one thing supremely well. I drove on, impelled by a combination of
fear and pride.”
Bannister crossed the
line and slumped into the arms of a friend, barely conscious. The chief
timekeeper was Harold Abrahams, the 100-meter champion at the 1924 Paris
Olympics whose story inspired the film “Chariots of Fire.” He handed a piece of
paper to Norris McWhirter, who announced the time.
The record lasted just
46 days. Landy ran 3:57.9 in Turku, Finland, on June 21, 1954. (The current
record stands at 3:43.13, held by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj since 1999.)
That set the stage for
the head-to-head showdown between Bannister and Landy on Aug. 7, 1954, at the
Empire Games, now called the Commonwealth Games, in Vancouver.
Always a front-runner,
Landy set a fast pace, leading by as much as 15 yards before Bannister caught
up as the bell rang for the final lap. When the Australian glanced over his
left shoulder on the final bend to check where Bannister was, the Englishman
raced past him on the right and won by about four yards in 3:58.8. Landy
clocked 3:59, the first time two men had run under 4 minutes in the same race.
Bannister capped his
amazing year by winning the 1,500 meters at the European championships in Bern,
Switzerland, in 3:43.8, his third major achievement in the span of a few
months.
“Each one proved
something different,” he said. “Each one was necessary.”
Sebastian Coe,
president of the IAAF, the athletics governing body, said Bannister’s death
represented a “day of intense sadness both for our nation and for all of us in
athletics.”
Coe ran a mile in a
then-world record time of 3 minutes, 47.33 seconds in 1981, between winning
gold medals at 1,500 meters at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics.
“There is not a single
athlete of my generation who was not inspired by Roger and his achievements
both on and off the track,” the Briton tweeted Sunday.
Bannister, who was
chosen Sports Illustrated’s first Sportsman of the Year in 1954, retired from
competition and pursued a full-time career in neurology. As chairman of
Britain’s Sports Council between 1971 and 1974, he developed the first test for
anabolic steroids.
Bannister also served
as master of Oxford’s Pembroke College from 1985-93. In 2012, he edited the
ninth edition of a textbook on nervous-system disease and said his most
treasured trophy was the lifetime achievement award he received in 2005 from
the American Academy of Neurology. He was knighted for his medical work in
1975.
“I wouldn’t claim to
have made any great discoveries, but at any rate I satisfactorily inched
forward in our knowledge of a particular aspect of medicine,” he said. “I’m far
more content with that than I am about any of the running I did earlier.”
Bannister was slowed in
later years by Parkinson’s, a neurological condition that fell under his
medical specialty.
His right ankle was
shattered in a car accident in 1975, and he had been unable to run since then.
In his late life, he walked with crutches inside his home and used a wheelchair
outdoors.
Bannister made several
public appearances as part of the 2012 London Olympics. He carried the flame on
the Oxford track where he broke the 4-minute mile during the torch relay and
attended the final of the men’s and women’s 1,500 meters at the games.
“I feel I never really
left,” he told the AP as he watched the action in the Olympic Stadium.
Bannister married Moyra
Jacobsson, an artist, in 1955. They had two sons and two daughters and lived in
a modest home only minutes away from the track where he made history.
Brasher, who founded
the London Marathon, died in 2003 at the age of 74. Chataway died in 2014 at
82.
Article: http://www.news-herald.com/article/HR/20180304/SPORTS/180309704
Video: https://www.youtube.com/user/AthletixStuffChannel
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