There are more people who have climbed Everest than broken the four-minute mile!
AS HE REVEALS HIS BATTLE WITH PARKINSON’S, SIR ROGER BANNISTER REFLECTS ON AN INCREDIBLE LIFE
THE carriage clock in Sir Roger Bannister’s living room in Oxford ticks loudly. The world’s first sub- four- minute miler is 85 now, a grandfather of 14 with a pair of crutches propped by his side.
It is 60 years since Bannister’s record-breaking run on May 6, 1954, but the relentless rhythm of the second hand has now taken on another significance.
Bannister has revealed he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease three years ago, half a century after he qualified as a consultant neurologist.
He has looked after many patients with the same progressive condition and the ‘gentle irony’ is not lost on him.
Walking is difficult now, let alone running, ‘one of the great pleasures’ of Bannister’s life, but he does not display the slightest hint of self-pity.
He has simply changed the monthly walking club he founded in Oxford in 2000 into a lunch club instead. His mind is pin- sharp. He telephones at 8am on the dot to confirm arrangements and spends the first 10 minutes interviewing me!
‘What is walking anyway?’ he says. ‘We had our 100th stroll not long ago but I’m now not able to go, so it’s lunch instead.
‘I have seen and looked after patients with so many neurological and other disorders that I am not surprised I have acquired an illness. It’s in the nature of things.’
For Bannister the athlete, time was also a challenge. He gave himself until the autumn of 1954 to run 1,760 yards in less than four minutes before he walked away from athletics to pursue a career in medicine aged 25.
His push to be the first became something of an obsession. It was Bannister against John Landy, the Australian who was to break his world record just 46 days later, and the only way Bannister felt he could compensate for the ‘bitter’ disappointment of finishing fourth in the 1500m at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki.
Three races in three days had proved too much for a student who did not consider himself a ‘ hard runner’ but, had he won gold in Finland, Bannister insists he would have ‘retreated into obscurity’. The first sub-fourminute mile would have belonged to someone else.
Instead, he adopted a doctor’s calculated approach to his task, rationalising that if a man can run a mile in four minutes and two seconds ‘there’s no logic in them saying they can’t run it in under four minutes’.
Yet the athlete’s doubts niggled away, up to 20 minutes before his record-breaking race. Bannister sharpened his spikes on the laboratory grindstone in London that morning and caught a train from Paddington to Oxford. But the misgivings lingered.
‘I knew that to fail would be damaging to me, psychologically, and the next time I tried I would have this little question mark in my mind,’ he says. ‘It was a gamble. I had another date in my mind, two weeks later in White City, but I could pull a muscle, have a minor accident, the weather could be even worse. Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher, my pacemakers, might not be available. All these thoughts enabled me, about 20 minutes before, to say, “Let’s do it”.’
Bannister closes his eyes and uses the rhythm of the clock to remember those snippets of time.
‘Fifty- eight seconds,’ he says, describing the first lap. ‘1:58. Then three minutes and one second.’ Bannister looks up. He has told the story of that day at Oxford’s Iffley Road cinder track countless times, yet his voice softens as he builds the suspense. The clock keeps ticking.
‘We were slowing,’ he continues, ‘and that was the very critical time when I had to be sure I could do the last lap in under 59 seconds.
‘I wasn’t sure over the last 20 yards. I felt the tape almost receding. I knew I couldn’t run any faster and I would just have to get to the line. I collapsed over the line and, when I came to, I heard Norris McWhirter’s announce-