He started the day at the St Mary’s Hospital lab in London, where he sharpened his spikes and rubbed graphite on them so they wouldn’t pick up too much of the track’s cinder ash. Bannister scheduled his attempt for May 6, during a meet between Oxford and the Amateur Athletic Union. Bannister, Landy and American miler Wes Santee were all threatening to break the mark and it became a matter of who would get there first. With his rhythm thrown off, Bannister finished fourth in a final won by Josy Barthel of Luxembourg.īy 1954, Hagg’s record mile time had stood for nine years. Just before the Games, he learned that organisers had added an extra round of heats, meaning he would have to run on three consecutive days. By modern standards, his daily half-hour workout was remarkably light.īannister was considered the favourite for the Helsinki gold in the 1,500m, the shorter metric mile distance run in the Olympics. By then, Bannister was a full-time medical student and had to juggle his studies with his training. The 19-year-old was selected as a “possible” for the British Olympic team, but decided he wasn’t ready and focused on preparing for the 1952 Helsinki Games. With the 1948 London Olympics approaching, Bannister was running mile times of around 4:10. “I knew from this day that I could develop this newfound ability,” he reflected in later life. Instead of dropping out of the race, as pacers normally do, he kept running and beat the field by 20 yards. As a first-year student on an academic scholarship at Oxford, Bannister caught his coaches’ attention while running as a pacemaker in a mile race on March 22, 1947. “I made up my mind then when I got to Oxford, I would take up running seriously,” said Bannister. They watched British middle-distance star Sydney Wooderson, who had emerged as a rival to the trio of Swedish runners who had taken the mile world record down close to the four-minute mark. At the outbreak of World War II, the family moved to the city of Bath, where Bannister sometimes ran to and from school.īannister’s 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. “I knew enough medicine and physiology to know it wasn’t a physical barrier, but I think it had become a psychological barrier.”īannister was born on March 23, 1929, in the London borough of Harrow. “There was no logic in my mind that if you can run a mile in four minutes, one-and-two-fifths, you can’t run it in 3:59,” he said. The four-minute mark seemed like a brick wall that would never be toppled.īannister was undaunted. When Sweden’s Gunder Hagg ran 4:01.4 in 1945, the chase was truly on, but, time and again, runners came up short. The numbers were easy for the public to grasp: 1 mile, four laps, four minutes. The quest to break the four-minute mile carried a special mystique. “My medical work has been my achievement and my family, with 14 grandchildren,” he said. While he will forever be remembered for his running, Bannister considered his long medical career in neurology as his life’s greatest accomplishment. Bannister regarded that as his greatest race, because it came in a competitive championship against his fiercest rival. He followed up his four-minute milestone a few months later by beating Australia’s John Landy in the “Miracle Mile” or “Mile of the Century” at the Empire Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, with both men going under four minutes. “It’s amazing that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have broken the four-minute mile,” Bannister said in 2012. 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. “He banked his treasure in the hearts of his friends.”īritish Prime Minister Theresa May remembered Bannister as a “British sporting icon whose achievements were an inspiration to us all. He was “surrounded by his family, who were as loved by him, as he was loved by them”, the family said in a statement. 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.īannister died peacefully in Oxford on Saturday at the age of 88. The 3 was all that mattered.īannister 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 announcer read out the time: “3.” The rest was drowned out by the roar of the crowd.
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