Bannister’s mile was moment for the ages
LONDON — It was a typical British afternoon in early May: wet, cool and blustery. Not exactly the ideal conditions for running four laps around a mile-long track faster than many thought humanly possible.
A lanky Oxford medical student named Roger Bannister looked up at the white-and-red English flag whipping in the wind atop a nearby church and figured he would have to call off the record attempt.
But then, shortly after 6 p.m. on May 6, 1954, the wind subsided. Bannister glanced up again and saw the flag fluttering gently. The race was on.
With two friends setting the pace, Bannister churned around the cinder track four times. His long arms and legs pumping, his lungs gasping for air, he put on a furious kick over the final 300 yards and nearly collapsed as he crossed the finish line.
The announcer read out the time: “Three …”
The rest was drowned out by the roar of the crowd. The “three” was all that mattered. Bannister had just become the first runner to break the mythical four-minute barrier in the mile — a feat of speed and endurance that stands as one of the seminal sporting achievements of the 20th century.
The black-and-white image of Bannister — eyes closed, head back, mouth wide open, straining across the tape at Oxford’s Iffley Road track — endures as a defining snapshot of a transcendent moment in track and field history.
Bannister died peacefully Saturday in Oxford at the age of 88. He was “surrounded by his family who were as loved by him as he was loved by them,” the family said in a statement released Sunday. “He banked his treasure in the hearts of his friends.”
British Prime Minister Theresa May remembered Bannister as a “British sporting icon whose achievements were an inspiration to us all. He will be greatly missed.”
Bannister’s time of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds captured the world’s imagination and buoyed the spirits of Britons still suffering through post-war austerity.
“It’s amazing that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have broken the four-minute mile,” Bannister said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2012.
Bannister followed up his milestone a few months later by topping Australia’s John Landy in the “Miracle Mile” or “Mile of the Century” at the Empire Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, where both men beat the four-minute mark. Bannister regarded that as his greatest race because it came in a competitive championship against his fiercest rival.
While he will forever be remembered for his running, Bannister considered his long medical career in neurology as his life’s greatest accomplishment.
“My medical work has been my achievement, and my family with 14 grandchildren,” he said. “Those are real achievements.”
The quest to break the so-called barrier carried a special mystique. The numbers were easy for the public to grasp: one mile, four laps, four
“I knew enough medicine and physiology to know it wasn’t a physical barrier, but I think it had become a psychological barrier.”
– ROGER BANNISTER, ON BEATING THE FOUR-MINUTE MILE MARK
minutes.
When Sweden’s Gunder Hagg ran 4:01.4 in 1945, the chase was truly on. But time and again, runners came up short as the four-minute mark began to seem like a brick wall that would never be toppled. Bannister was undaunted. “There was no logic in my mind that if you can run a mile in 4 minutes, 1 and 2/5ths (seconds), you can’t run it in 3:59,” he said. “I knew enough medicine and physiology to know it wasn’t a physical barrier, but I think it had become a psychological barrier.”
Bannister was born on March 23, 1929, in the London borough of Harrow. At the outbreak of World War II, the family moved to the city of Bath, where Bannister sometimes ran to and from school.
His passion for running took off in 1945, when his father took him to a track meet at London’s White City Stadium, which was built to host the 1908 Olympics. They watched British middle-distance star Sydney Wooderson, who had emerged as a rival to a trio of Swedish runners who had taken the mile record down close to the four-minute mark.
“I made up my mind then when I got to Oxford, I would take up running seriously,” Bannister said.
As a first-year student on an academic scholarship, he caught his coaches’ attention while running as a pacesetter in a mile race on March 22, 1947. Instead of dropping out of the race as such runners normally do, he kept going and beat the field by 20 yards.
“I knew from this day that I could develop this newfound ability,” he reflected in later life.
The day he broke four minutes, Bannister crossed the line and slumped into the arms of a friend, barely conscious. The chief timekeeper was Harold Abrahams, the 100-meter champion at the 1924 Paris Olympics whose story inspired the film “Chariots of Fire.” He handed a piece of paper to Norris McWhirter, who announced the time.
The record lasted just 46 days. Landy, his Australian rival, clocked a time of 3:57.9 on June 21, 1954 in Turku, Finland. The current record is 3:43.13, held by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj since 1999.
Bannister was chosen Sports Illustrated’s first Sportsman of the Year in 1954, and he retired from competition the same year to pursue a full-time career in neurology. As chairman of Britain’s Sports Council in the early 1970s, he developed the first test for anabolic steroids. He was knighted for his medical work in 1975.
He later served as master of Oxford’s Pembroke College, and in 2012, he edited the ninth edition of a textbook on nervous-system disease. He said his most treasured trophy was the lifetime achievement award he received in 2005 from the American Academy of Neurology.
“I wouldn’t claim to have made any great discoveries, but at any rate I satisfactorily inched forward in our knowledge of a particular aspect of medicine,” he said. “I’m far more content with that than I am about any of the running I did earlier.”