‘One of the great runs of all time’
Bannister was the first miler to break four minutes
On the morning of May 6, 1954, a Thursday, Roger Bannister, 25, a medical student in London, worked his usual shift at St. Mary’s Hospital and took an early afternoon train to Oxford. He had lunch with some old friends, then met a couple of his track teammates, Christopher Chataway and Chris Brasher. As members of an amateur all-star team, they were preparing to run against Oxford University.
About 1,200 people showed up at Ox- ford’s unprepossessing Iffley Road track to watch, and though the day was blustery and damp — inauspicious conditions for a record-setting effort — a record is what they saw. Paced by Chataway and Brasher and powered by an explosive kick, his signature, Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes — 3:59.4, to be exact — becoming the first man ever to do so, breaking through a mystical barrier and creating a seminal moment in sports history.
“Those last few seconds seemed never-ending. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me.” ROGER BANNISTER ON BREAKING THE FOURMINUTE BARRIER
Bannister’s feat was trumpeted on front pages around the world. He had reached “one of man’s hitherto unattainable goals,” The New York Times declared. His name, like those of Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones and Jesse Owens, became synonymous with singular athletic achievement.
Then, astonishingly — at least from the vantage point of the 21st century — Bannister, at the height of his athletic career, retired from competitive running later that year, to concentrate on medicine.
“Now that I am taking up a hospital appointment,” he said in an address to the English Sportswriters Association that December, “I shall have to give up international athletics. I shall not have sufficient time to put up a first-class performance. There would be little satisfaction for me in a secondrate performance, and it would be wrong to give one when representing my country.”
After a long career as a neurologist, both in research and clinical practice, Bannister, who was knighted in 1975, died on Saturday in Oxford, his family confirmed in a statement on Sunday. He was 88.
His record-setting feat would be surpassed many times. Runners in the next decades would be faster, stronger, betterequipped, better-trained and able to devote much of their time to the pursuit while benefitting from advances in sports science. But their later success did not dim the significance of Bannister’s run.
“He was running on 28 training miles a week,” Sebastian Coe, who set the world record in the mile three different times, once said. “He did it on limited scientific knowledge, with leather shoes in which the spikes alone probably weighed more than the tissue-thin shoes today, on tracks at which speedway riders would turn up their noses. So as far as I’m concerned, that was one of the great runs of all time.”
Tall and lanky with a long, forceful stride and a blond head that usually bobbed above his competitors’ in a race, Bannister was a gentleman athlete with a philosophical turn of mind. Sports Illustrated called him “among the most private of public men, inexhaustibly polite, cheerfully distant, open and complex.”
His 1955 memoir — called, of course, The Four Minute Mile — amounted to a portrait of the athlete as a young artist. In a typically analytic and introspective passage, he described the moment at which a runner decides to break from the pack and take the lead:
“The decision to ‘break away’ results from a mixture of confidence and lack of it. The ‘breaker’ is confident to the extent that he suddenly decides the speed has become slower than he can himself sustain to the finish. Hence he can accelerate suddenly and maintain his new speed to the tape. But he also lacks confidence, feeling that unless he makes a move now, everyone else will do so and he will be left standing.”
The idea at the heart of this passage — that you must seize the right moment or risk its passing forever — was very much a factor in Bannister’s record-setting run.
The meet in Oxford was Bannister’s first in eight months, and he had been training seriously for six of them. As the year went on, he would face far stiffer competition, but with Brasher (later an Olympic steeplechase champion) and Chataway (later the world record holder at 5,000 meters) enlisted as his supporting cast, he chose May 6 and the familiar Iffley Road track, where he’d run as an Oxford man himself, as the time and place for his assault on the four-minute mark. The unpromising weather nearly persuaded him to call off the attempt, run an ordinary race and save the more intensive effort for a meet in London scheduled 10 days later. This was no small decision.
“Failure is as exciting to watch as success, provided the effort is absolutely genuine and complete,” he wrote in his memoir. “But the spectators fail to understand — and how can they know — the mental agony through which an athlete must pass before he can give his maximum effort. And how rarely, if he is built as I am, he can give it.”
The wind died down, however, shortly before the race, and standing at the starting line, Bannister made the decision: The attempt was on. With Brasher setting the early pace, Bannister ran the first quarter mile in 57.5 seconds and the first half mile in 1:58. Then Chataway took the lead, and after three quarters, the time was 3:00.7. Bannister passed him with 300 yards to go. “Those last few seconds seemed never-ending,” Bannister wrote. “The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace, after the struggle. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me if only I reached the tape without slackening my speed. If I faltered, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would be a cold, forbidding place, because I had been so close.
“I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last spring to save himself from the chasm that threatens to engulf him.”