His greatest victory was a ‘complete’ life
Sir Roger Bannister, CH, CBE, athlete and physician: b London, March 23, 1929; m Moyra Elver Jacobsson; d March 3, 2018, aged 88.
On the morning of May 6, 1954 a junior doctor named Roger Bannister ate porridge for breakfast, went to work at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, London, then caught a train to Oxford for an athletics meet between Oxford University and the Amateur Athletics Association. It was a meet with a difference. It was the meet at which Bannister had resolved to become the first to break the fourminute mile – a goal that was being hotly pursued by his two great rivals, Wes Santee of the United States and John Landy of Australia, but which many thought impossible.
The auguries were poor. A galeforce wind was blowing. Bannister considered postponing his attempt, but on the train Franz Stampfl, his Austrian coach, warned that this might be his last opportunity. ‘‘If there is only a half-good chance you may never forgive yourself for missing it,’’ he said. ‘‘You will feel pain, but what’s pain?’’
Bannister ate a ham salad at a friend’s house, then went to the Iffley Road track about 4.30pm for the 6pm race. The wind was still strong. Bannister remained undecided about running. Thirty minutes before the start his pacesetters, Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, demanded a decision. Bannister noticed that the flag on a nearby church tower was drooping. ‘‘Right, we’ll go for it,’’ he declared.
About 3000 spectators had gathered to watch. Brasher made a false start, then the gun went off a second time and the race was on. For two laps Brasher set the pace while the tall, gangly Bannister tucked in behind him. ‘‘Faster,’’ Bannister shouted. Brasher prudently ignored him.
At the halfway stage their time was 1 min 58 sec, and Chataway took over as pacesetter. The third lap took just over 62 sec, meaning Bannister had to run the final lap in 59. Three hundred yards from the finish he overtook Chataway.
‘‘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,’’ recalled Bannister.
‘‘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.
‘‘I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last desperate fling to save himself from a chasm that threatens to engulf him. Then my effort was over and I collapsed, almost unconscious. It was only then that real pain overtook me . . . I felt like an exploded flashbulb.’’
Slowly, dramatically, McWhirter announced the result: ‘‘First, Number 41, RG Bannister, in a time which, subject to ratification, is a new track record, British native record, all-comers record, European, British Empire and world record – three minutes . . .’’
The rest was lost in what The Times described as ‘‘scenes of the wildest excitement’’. Bannister had broken the four-minute mile with a time of 3 min 59.4 sec. It was an astounding feat, not least because he was a part-time athlete running on a wet cinder track. It was an achievement that made him an international celebrity overnight.
Within months he gave up competitive running to focus on medicine. He became a fine physician and distinguished neurologist, and would tell interviewers that he was prouder of what he achieved in medical research than in athletics. He chaired the Sports Council, was president of the International Council for Sport and Physical Recreation, and served eight years as master of Pembroke College, Oxford.
‘‘Running was just a small part of my life,’’ he said. ‘‘I thought the ideal was the complete man who had a career outside sport.’’
Roger Gilbert Bannister was born in 1929, the descendant of a Norman soldier called Robert de Banastre. He was brought up in a house in suburban Harrow, northwest London. His early aptitude for running helped him to escape a gang of bullies on a nearby housing estate.
‘‘My running ability seemed to have come to me as a gift – as if by magic,’’ he wrote. He was a quiet and deeply earnest child who worked so hard that one master told him: ‘‘You’ll be dead before you’re 21 if you go on at this rate.’’
When the family returned to London in 1944 he went to University College School in Hampstead. The next year his father took him to the White City stadium in west London, where he watched the British runner Sydney Wooderson win a thrilling race against Arne Andersson of Sweden.
‘‘I resolved then to become a miler,’’ he recalled. At 17 he went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read medicine, and joined the athletics club, earning a blue.
Bannister had never worn spikes or run on a track.
He undertook only what he later described as ‘‘ridiculously inadequate’’ training, but at a lithe 6ft 2in he was a natural athlete.
In early 1950 he was introduced to a new method of ‘‘interval training’’ that gave the runner speed and stamina by alternating gentle and fast running over varying distances.
He also studied his body mechanics to make his running style more efficient. Bannister began to improve, although he still trained alone and had no coach. That Christmas he ran 4 min 9.9 sec at a meet in New Zealand. He went to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki as favourite for the 1500m – the so-called metric mile. The heats, semi-finals and finals were staged on consecutive days and Bannister came fourth despite breaking the Olympic record. The gold was won by Luxembourg’s Josy Barthel.
After Helsinki Bannister set himself a new goal. He gave himself two years to break the four-minute mile – a feat athletes had dreamt of for a century and, in his words, ‘‘a barrier that seemed to defy all attempts to break it’’.
He stepped up his training, but by April 1954 he had plateaued. In desperation Brasher, Chataway and Stampfl, his first proper coach, went climbing in Scotland, got drenched, slept little and ate badly. It was a ‘‘lunatic’’ thing to do, Bannister acknowledged, but it worked. They came back and ran 59 sec laps, setting the stage for Bannister’s triumph in Oxford the next month.
As a young doctor, he found it hard to win the respect of his colleagues. ‘‘People had difficulty
I drove on, impelled by a combination of fear and pride. Roger Bannister, on his historic run.
imagining me, a four-minutemiler, as a serious physician.’’ It drove him to work even harder with obsessive attention to detail.
Life became easier in 1963 when Bannister was appointed as a consultant neurologist at St Mary’s and London’s National Hospital, the world’s first neurological hospital, where he remained for the next 25 years.
Bannister was fascinated with the brain and specialised in failures of the autonomic nervous system – a field in which he had become interested as a student after visiting paraplegic patients at the Stoke Mandeville spinal injuries unit a few years after the war.
He founded the pioneering Autonomic Investigation Unit at the National Hospital, and was awarded the American Academy of Neurology’s first lifetime achievement award in 2005.
He also edited the standard neurological textbook, Brain’s Clinical Neurology, which was later renamed Brain and Bannister’s Clinical Neurology.
His research into the neurodegenerative disorder ShyDrager syndrome showed that the condition could be improved if patients slept with their heads slightly raised.
Bannister still found time to promote sport and exercise.
He played a small role in setting up the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme. He served as the first independent chairman of the Sports Council between 1971 and 1974, and was responsible for a substantial increase in sport facilities, as well as initiating the first tests for anabolic steroids in athletes and promoting corporate sponsorship of sports.
In 1975 he was knighted for his services to sport.
Between 1976 and 1983 he was president of the International Council of Sport and Physical Education, travelling widely and helping to promote sport on an international level. In that role he opposed the US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, arguing that sportsmen and women alone should not have to sacrifice.
Bannister and his family, wife Moyra Elver Jacobsson, and their four children, relaxed at their country cottage in the village of Lyminster in West Sussex. He founded an orienteering club in the area and bought a small yacht.
He also played golf, sometimes with the former England cricket captain Colin Cowdrey.
However, Bannister’s ability to run, something he had continued to do for recreation, was abruptly curtailed in an accident in 1975 when a car broke through the central barrier on a motorway and collided head on with his vehicle as he and Moyra drove to London. His ankle was crushed and his wife’s ribs were broken.
In 2015 he decided to sell the kangaroo leather running shoes in which he had made history. They sold at Christies for £266,500, five times above the estimate. Bannister donated the money to the Autonomic Charitable Trust.
Gentlemanly and modest to the last about his considerable achievements, Bannister was nonetheless a man of strong opinions, which were regularly expressed on the letters page of The Times. In April 2015, he wrote disparaging the idea that the game of bridge should be considered a sport. ‘‘It surprised me as neurologist that a distinguished member of the judiciary, Mr Justice Mostyn, believes that ‘the brain is a muscle’.’’
– The Times