The brilliant doctor who broke the four-minute mile

Sir Roger Bannister always said that he was prouder of his long career in medicine than of anything he achieved as an athlete in his youth. But to the rest of the world, he will be remembered as the man who broke the four-minute mile. A sportsman in the true amateur tradition, Bannister, who has died aged 88, was at that point a junior doctor at St Mary’s Hospital in London, working long hours. On 6 May 1954, he got on a train to Oxford, for a 6pm race at Iffley Road running track. It was a cold, wet day and the wind was blowing hard, said The Times. Even at 5:30pm, he was thinking he might withdraw. Then, with his pacesetters – Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway – wanting a decision, he looked at a nearby church tower and saw its flag had drooped. “Right, we’ll go for it,” he said.

Around 3,000 spectators had gathered to watch the race; Harold Abrahams – the 1924 gold-winning Olympian – was there, commentating live for the BBC. After a false start, the gun fired a second time and the men were off, with Brasher setting the pace. At the halfway stage, their time was 1:58, and Chataway took over. They ran the third lap in 62 seconds, giving Bannister only 59 seconds to complete the last quarter mile. Three hundred yards from the line, he sped ahead of Chataway. “I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well,” he recalled. Driving himself forward, he leapt through the tape – and collapsed, almost unconscious, into waiting arms. “It was only then that real pain overtook me... I felt like an exploded flashbulb.” The result was announced by Norris Mcwhirter. “First, Number 41, R.G. Bannister, Amateur Athletic Association and formerly of Exeter and Merton Colleges, 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 drowned out by the roar of the crowd. Bannister had run the mile in three minutes and 59.4 seconds. That evening, the three friends climbed Harrow Hill together. London was spread out beneath them, and as 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.”

Roger Bannister was born in Harrow in 1929. His father, Ralph, was a former mill worker from Lancashire who’d got a clerical post in the civil service, said The Guardian. During the War, the family was evacuated to Bath. Roger broke the cross-country record at City of Bath Boys’ School. Returning to London, he ran like the wind at University College School too – but also became interested in medicine. Aged 16, he won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, to read medicine. He joined the athletics club, became a blue and – while still a teenager – was made president of the club, in which role he oversaw the modernisation of the Iffley Road track. By 1950, he was one of Britain’s finest runners, although he didn’t even have a coach. (He felt that with his medical training, he could devise his own regimes.) In April 1951, he ran a mile in 4:08.3 in front of 40,000 people in Philadelphia. “No manager, no trainer, no masseur, no friends! He’s nuts or he’s good,” wrote one US paper of the willowy Briton (he was 6ft 2in). Later that year, he ran the mile in 4:07.8. The record at the time, set in 1945, was 4:01.4. At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, he was a favourite for the “metric mile” (the 1,500 metres) – but by then, he’d started his clinical training at St Mary’s and barely had any time to train. He’d hoped he’d done enough (although some days it was no more than 35 minutes), but he hadn’t counted on the heats being on consecutive days. His stamina simply wasn’t up to it, and he finished fourth in the final. It was, he said, a “shattering blow” and the press gave him a mauling. Yet this failure sealed his destiny, said The Times: had he won gold, he’d have retired. Instead, he set his sights on a new goal: the four-minute mile. It had, he said, become “rather like an Everest – a challenge to the human spirit”.

He stepped up his training, and in 1953 ran a mile in 4:02.0. But the Australian runner John Landy was closing in, and only 46 days after Bannister ran the fourminute mile, Landy beat his record. In the scheme of things, it did not matter. As Bannister said of himself and his pacesetters, “we shared a place where no man had yet ventured, secure for all time, however fast men might run miles in the future”. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to meet Landy for a showdown at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver in August 1954 – the “Miracle Mile”, watched by 40 million people on TV. Landy was in the lead, but made a critical error: just before the finish, he turned to look for his opponent. Emboldened in that moment, Bannister raced ahead and won. Less than a month later, Bannister won the 1,500 metres at the European Championships at Bern – then retired. He was 25.

It was not the end of his career in sport: he was the first chairman of the Sports Council, from 1971 to 1974, and president of the International Council of Sport and Physical Education, from 1976 to 1983. But from then on, medicine was his life – and he applied himself to it with such devotion there were several years in which his family barely saw him. (He’d married Moyra Jacobsson, an artist, in 1955, and had four children.) In 1963, after a spell at Harvard, he became a consultant neurologist at St Mary’s and at London’s National Hospital. With a particular interest in the autonomic nervous system, he conducted extensive research into various neurological conditions. He edited the standard neurological textbook, founded the Autonomic Research Society and lectured widely. Knighted in 1975, he served on many committees and in 1985 was made master of Pembroke College, Oxford, a job he loved. In 2005, he became the first recipient of the American Academy of Neurology’s lifetime achievement award.

When his children were small, he’d take them for daily morning runs in Kensington Gardens – but he said he had no desire for them to become “elite athletes”. In an interview years later, he said he thought too narrow a focus on sport was “boring”. His athletic achievements, he said, were the “shadow of my being, not the substance”. At other times, he said that his marriage was “the most important thing I did”. Nevertheless, it came as a blow when he had to give up running after a car accident in 1975. In 2012, he returned to Iffley Road to walk the Olympic torch along the track he had once sped around. Two years later, he revealed he had Parkinson’s. It seemed cruel, but having spent years treating such diseases, he was not surprised. “It’s in the nature of things,” he said. “There’s a gentle irony to it.”

“‘No manager, no trainer, no masseur, no friends! He’s nuts or he’s good,’ wrote one US paper of the willowy Briton”