“I knew that I had sub-four minutes inside me, somewhere,” Mr. Bannister said in an interview with The Globe and Mail in 2014, six decades after his record run.Archive
A year before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954 – one of the towering achievements in athletic history – the young Englishman had given up on running. It was getting in the way of his medical studies.
But the lure of redemption was powerful. Mr. Bannister was a gold-medal favourite at the Olympics in 1952 but finished fourth. Several top runners were chasing the four-minute mile, a barrier that seemingly could not be breached. Mr. Bannister returned to the track to train. The methods were rudimentary. He would skip a class and run intervals at lunch. He didn't warm up before or cool down after. And certainly, there were no performance-enhancing steroids, no scientifically designed shoes, nothing but hard work and perseverance. But he ran into history.
Mr. Bannister died on Saturday in Oxford, England. He was 88.
"I knew that I had sub-four minutes inside me, somewhere," Mr. Bannister said in an interview with The Globe and Mail in 2014, six decades after his record run.
On May 6, 1954, Mr. Bannister worked a morning shift at a hospital in London and took a train to Oxford. The day was inclement but through the afternoon the rains and winds eased. But on a cinder track, Mr. Bannister stretched the limits of human endeavour by running the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds.
The final strides had felt never-ending and he fell into the arms of officials afterward, exhausted. He would later write, "the arms of the world were waiting to receive me. If I faltered, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would be a cold, forbidding place because I had been so close."
The news of Mr. Bannister's feat was on front pages worldwide. It was the much the same three months later, in the summer in Vancouver, when Mr. Bannister again eclipsed the four-minute barrier in a fabled race against Australian John Landy, dubbed the Miracle Mile.
Mr. Bannister retired from running at the end of 1954 and had a long, celebrated career in medicine as a neurologist. "I've had quite an interesting life, doing a number of things, some of them related to sport, but quite another life as a doctor," he told The Globe in 2014. It is, however, his speed on the track for which he is best remembered.
In the mid-1950s, the four-minute mile was in sight – yet felt out of reach. A record of 4:01.4, run by Gunder Hagg of Sweden in 1945, had stood for almost a decade.
Runners such as Mr. Bannister Mr. Landy were close, and they were undaunted by the idea there was some ultimate barrier.
"It had been talked about for 60 years in all, as a target," Mr. Bannister told The Globe of the four-minute mile.
"As a physiologist, as a medical student, it didn't seem logical to me. If you could find Swedes who could do it in 4:01 2/5s, then you could find somebody to break four minutes.
"But it did seem that [the record] had been stuck. Nobody seemed to be able to beat it."
Mr. Bannister did have science on his mind, even if it was basic compared with current norms. In 1954, after using himself as a test case and measuring his own consumption of oxygen, he published a paper called "The Carbon Dioxide Stimulus to Breathing in Severe Exercise."
In training, Mr. Bannister would sprint 10 intervals of 400 metres each, a quarter of a mile. He'd take a two-minute break in between. He cut his interval time to 59 seconds from 63 seconds in about half a year of work.
By the standards of a competitive recreational runner today, it was a tiny amount of training. And Mr. Bannister ran in leather shoes with heavy spikes, on a cinder track that would seem like quicksand to athletes these days. The feat still awes those who came later.
Briton Sebastian Coe, who set the mile record three times – his best was 3:47.33 in 1981 – has described Mr. Bannister's dash into history as "one of the great runs of all time."
The speed required to run a four-minute mile is dizzying – a sprint of at least 24.2 kilometres an hour over the mile. A typical treadmill at a local gym cannot even be set at this speed.
Four minutes was a holy grail on the track – until it was broken. Mr. Bannister predicted at the time others would soon follow. From 1957 through 1999, the mile record was surpassed 17 times, by a dozen men, aided with better training and smarter sports science.
The four-minute mark is no longer mythic, nor is the race often run, but it still belongs to the realm of elite runners. Ninety-three men went under four minutes outdoors in 2017. The current record is 3:43.13, set by Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999.
Mr. Bannister's record at Oxford has a Canadian connection. John Turner, who served as prime minister in 1984, was a sprinter as a young man and teammates at Oxford with the captain of the track squad, Mr. Bannister.
In 1954, Mr. Turner was home in Vancouver, studying for his bar exams. He got a call from Chris Chataway, who would be one of Mr. Bannister's pacesetters. Mr. Chataway invited Mr. Turner to Oxford for the race.
Mr. Turner, who couldn't go, offered important advice. Mr. Turner said the Oxford track should be surveyed again, to ensure it was a quarter-mile. He also advised to get six watches from Cartier in London that had been tested for accuracy, so the time would not be in dispute.
Mr. Turner heard of the record by phone when a news recording was played for him. The track announcer said, "The time is three …," and then came the sound of bedlam on the phone line.
"It was the crowd, going nuts," Mr. Turner recalled in an interview on Sunday.
Mr. Bannister's record stood for six weeks, until Mr. Landy ran 1.4 seconds faster in Turku, Finland. The new mark set up a titanic clash at the British Empire Games that August in Vancouver.
Sports Illustrated, in its debut issue that summer, described the race as the "most widely heralded and universally contemplated foot race of all time."
In front of a crowd of more than 30,000, Mr. Landy led most of the race but near the end, he looked over his shoulder to see where Mr. Bannister was.
His pursuer passed him on the other side. Mr. Bannister won and both men ran faster than four minutes, one of the biggest moments in Canada's sports history.
Beyond the track, Mr. Bannister – he was knighted Sir Roger in 1975 – is remembered as a gentleman. Ray Heard, a Canadian political strategist and journalist, was at a family wedding in London in 1989. Mr. Bannister was seated beside him. "He was very modest," Mr. Heard said. When Mr. Heard asked about running, Mr. Bannister said: "As a matter of fact, I would be preferred to be remembered for my work as a neurologist."
In the 2014 interview with The Globe, Mr. Bannister asked the first questions, reeling off a series of queries to a reporter, "are you a recreational runner?" among them. After the story was published, and a copy had been sent to Mr. Bannister in Oxford, he responded by e-mail. "If I may say so," wrote Mr. Bannister, "it seems to have come out well, and I hope your editor and readers were pleased."
This exemplifies Mr. Bannister to his close friends such as Mr. Turner. On the track, Mr. Bannister was one of the greatest in history, but it was only one facet of the man.
"Calm, polite, smart, comfortable to be with," Mr. Turner said. "Roger was a very fine gentlemen, all the way."