We seemed to be going so slowly. I shouted, ‘Faster!’
Following the death of the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, we look back at that day and his many other achievements
of Bannister hit the front and was roared home. “I felt the moment of a lifetime had come,” he said later. “Those last few seconds seemed never ending. The faint sight of the finishing line stood ahead.”
Bannister, who was knighted in 1975 and made a Companion of Honour last year, said that the fear of being branded a failure also helped keep his legs pumping. He described how he leapt through the tape “like a man taking his last spring” into the embraces of his supporters. “I fell almost unconscious,” he said. “It was only then the real pain overtook me. I knew I had done it before I even heard the time.”
When the sub-four minute mile was officially announced there was pandemonium. But Bannister held the record for just 46 days before Landy snatched it away. A few months later the pair clashed at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver in a race dubbed “the miracle mile”. It was the Briton who triumphed there, breaking four minutes once again into the bargain.
A year after his record feat, Bannister married the artist Moyra Jacobsson, daughter of the Swedish economist Per Jacobssen, who served as managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and they went on to have four children.
After retiring from the track he became a leading neurologist, whose work led to a better understanding of degenerative conditions. Indeed, Sir Roger’s pioneering research into diseases of the autonomic nervous system, led him to produce a text book on neurology which ran to six editions.
He became the first chairman of the Sports Council in 1971 and a year later it devised a test to detect anabolic steroids, a major step forward in the battle against drug cheats in sport.
Bannister was appointed Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1985, a post he held up to his retirement eight years later.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011 but a year later he was well enough to hand over the Olympic flame as part of the lead-up to London 2012 at the Iffley Road track where he had enjoyed his greatest moment – except by then it had been renamed in his honour.