MAN WHO DID THE IMPOSSIBLE.
ATHLETICS CAME SECOND TO MEDICINE, FAMILY
• It was at the Iffley Road track in Oxford, England on May 6, 1954, running in cold rain and a crosswind, that Roger Bannister made history.
The race commentator, Norris McWhirter, announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, here is the result of event number 9, the one mile. First: number 41, R G Bannister ... with a time which is a new meeting and track record and which, subject to ratification, will be a new English native, British national, British all-comers, European, British Empire and world record. The time is three ... “
The rest (the time was 3:59.4) was lost in the deafening roar of the ecstatic crowd.
Running a mile in less than four minutes had been deemed impossible. As Bannister himself later recalled: “The four-minute mile had become rather like an Everest — a challenge to the human spirit.”
Bannister was later to remark of the race: “The physical overdraft came only from greater willpower. Those last few seconds seemed never-ending.” Afterward he “felt like an exploded flashlight, no will to live.”
Bannister died Saturday in Oxford at age 88, his family said Sunday.
After his race, Bannister climbed nearby Harrow Hill with his pacemakers, Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher, whom he later made godfathers to his first son. The three men looked down on a glittering London, and Brasher later remembered: “We didn’t have anything to say to each other. We all knew that the world was at our feet and that we could do anything we wanted in life.”
As it happened, Bannister held his world record for only 46 days before it was broken by Australian John Landy.
The two men were due to face one another at the Empire Games in Vancouver in August, and both knew that this battle would mean more to Bannister than the fourminute mile and more to Landy than the world record. As Bannister wrote: “The world seemed almost too small for us both, and we must meet to settle the score. The race would settle our rivalry.”
The Bannister-versus-Landy mile race turned into a huge media fanfare, and 40 million people watched on television. It became one of the most exciting duels of all time as Bannister passed Landy on the last lap. In looking around, Landy had lost a valuable fraction of a second — and Bannister grabbed his chance and passed him to win in 3:58.8 seconds.
Bannister went on to win the European Championships before disappearing from the athletics scene to practice medicine.
Descended from a Norman soldier named Robert de Banastre, Roger Gilbert Bannister was born at Harrow, England on March 23, 1929 to Alice, a Sunday school teacher, and Ralph Bannister, a public servant.
In his memoirs, Bannister recalled that by the age of nine he had already learned that his best defence against bullies “was to be so fleet of foot that they thought it too bothersome to pursue me.” On one occasion in elementary school he and a friend were chased by a gang. “I took to my heels … pounding hard down the road until I got home, breathless and frightened.”
On the outbreak of war, the family moved to Bath, and sport became his way of commanding respect among his peers, and he won his first race — a three-mile junior cross-country — at age 13.
While training as a doctor, he used to climb over fences to find fields large enough to run in, and once crashed into some concrete blocks at night, ending up in hospital. He represented Great Britain at the Olympic Games in Helsinki in 1952. He came fourth in the final. He said later that, had he won the gold, he would have retired. Instead, his focus changed and he became intent on breaking the four-minute mile.
After the Olympics, Bannister came under fierce criticism for his training methods. He had avoided competition, and his preparation was described as “unenterprising” and “perfunctory.” This was, however, deliberate, because of what he called the “tremendous nervous strain” that he suffered during races.
Bannister has often been called the last of the amateurs. He was essentially a self-made athlete who never allowed sports to take over his life. He would write that “my ideal athlete was first and foremost a human being who ran his sport and did not allow it to run him.”
After retiring from running at 25, Bannister threw himself into his medical career.
In 1955, Bannister married Moyra Elver, an artist and the daughter of Per Jacobsson, chairman of the International Monetary Fund. He once observed that his marriage was “the most important thing I did.” The couple had two sons and two daughters.
He accepted that he would be remembered principally for his record-breaking achievement in 1954. But although proud of that milestone, he regarded it as an interruption of his career in medicine: it was, he said, “the shadow of my being, not the substance.”