Roger Bannister

• Born: March 23, 1929
• Birthplace: Harrow, Middlesex, England
• Died: March 3, 2018
• Place of death: Oxford, England

Early Life

Roger Gilbert Bannister was born on March 24, 1929, in Harrow, Middlesex, England. His father, Ralph, was a treasury official who cared little for athletics. Nevertheless, Bannister saw sports as a way to gain the sense of achievement about which he dreamed as a boy. Although he always wanted to be a doctor, he also realized he had a talent for athletics. With his talent, he was determined to succeed in sports. This determination helped him perform one of the most amazing feats in sports history: running a mile in less than four minutes. For that monumental accomplishment, he was known as one of the greatest athletes in any sport, at any time.

The Road to Excellence

As a schoolboy, Bannister had good success as a runner. At twelve years old, he won a school cross-country race. After repeating as school champion for the next two years, he lost interest in running and began bicycling and playing rugby. If he had followed his first interest, he would have been a rowing crew member at Cambridge University. After unsuccessful attempts at rowing and at pursuing a medical career, he went to Oxford University instead. There, in 1946, he joined the track team and ran his first mile race in 4 minutes, 53.0 seconds, finishing fifth. The four-minute mile seemed a long way off, but he believed it could be done—and he believed he was the one to do it.

Because Bannister had a deep curiosity about the science and mechanics of running, he applied his medical knowledge to athletics. Oddly enough, experts claimed that running a four-minute mile was physically impossible. Through precise medical experiments and calculations, Bannister discovered that the barrier was not physical, but psychological.

Bannister intensified his training, focusing on reducing his heart rate. He knew that a stronger heart pumped more oxygen-rich blood to the muscles, increasing his overall strength and endurance. His methods began to work. By 1951, Roger was one of Europe’s best middle-distance runners. He began to win events from 1 mile to 800 meters. He made the 1952 Olympic team and placed fourth in the 1,500 meters. Each race seemed to bring him closer to his goal.

The Emerging Champion

Bannister continued to improve and was undefeated in 1953. However, no one—except Bannister and a few of his supporters—expected him to break the four-minute barrier in the very first track meet of the following season. On May 6, 1954, on a windy, rainy day at a dual meet at Oxford University, he ran the mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. The phenomenal achievement astonished the world, and headlines declared his feat “the most important sports event of the century.”

The closest anyone had come to the four-minute mile was Gunder Haegg of Sweden, whose time was 4 minutes, 1.4 seconds, set in July, 1945. In fact, runners had come within 1.6 seconds of the four-minute barrier for about ten years and had been within 10 seconds for about twenty years. The barrier seemed insurmountable under any conditions. On the day of Bannister’s famous mile, the conditions were extremely poor. The wind blew at about fifteen miles per hour, and rain had fallen within an hour before the race. Even though the conditions were unfavorable, he decided to run the race and attempt to break the barrier.

As the race began, Bannister followed closely behind his teammates Chris Chataway and Chris Basher. As Basher led for the first quarter-mile, Bannister called out “faster, faster!” to increase the pace. He ran the first quarter-mile in 57.5 seconds. At the half-mile point, which he reached in 1 minute, 58.2 seconds, Chataway took the lead, pacing him through the three-quarter point in 3 minutes 0.5 seconds. He needed to run the last quarter-mile in 59.4 seconds or less to break the barrier. In a courageous burst of speed on the last lap, he powered his way through the pain and the poor conditions, running the last quarter-mile in 58.9 seconds. As he collapsed into the arms of his teammates, he also breached one of the most feared barriers of all time. He had broken the four-minute mile.

Continuing the Story

Bannister was correct in his beliefs; the psychological barrier was the largest obstacle between runners and the four-minute mile. Within six weeks, John Landy of Australia ran a mile in 3 minutes 58 seconds. Within three years, runners had broken the four-minute barrier eighteen times. In fact, the flood of athletes running in fewer than four minutes was so great that some medical experts accused runners of using drugs and other stimulants to improve their performance. All the athletes, including Bannister, strongly denied drug use.

After 1954, Bannister retired from competitive running. He went on to complete medical school and became a neurologist and surgeon for London hospitals. He married Moyra Jacobssen in 1955, then settled into his life as a doctor. The man who had led the way for greater athletic performance was forging a career in medicine. He became a well-known doctor but always remained most famous for his great mile run. The work he did in medicine and in support of athletics showed that not only was he a great miler, but he was also a great citizen. Moving away from private practice, he focused more on research following a serious car accident in 1974. In addition to being knighted in 1975, he was the president of what became the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education from 1976 to 1983 and he helped lead research into the first processes for testing for anabolic steroids. Additionally, from 1985 to 1993 he held the mastership of Pembroke College. In 2001, he retired from the medical profession. Three years later, to salute the fiftieth anniversary of Roger’s historic run, England minted a commemorative fifty-pence piece.

Bannister struggled with Parkinson's disease in the later stages of his life. He died on March 3, 2018, in Oxford; he was eighty-eight.

Summary

Although other athletes have performed outstanding physical feats, none quite compares to Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile. While his race was the culmination of intense physical training and effort, it was also a victory over the psychological barriers unconquered by generations of athletes. People in all walks of life—athletic, academic, business, entertainment, or politics—used Bannister’s famous mile run as motivation to overcome their own obstacles. The first sub-four-minute mile continues to stand as one of the greatest all-time athletic achievements. Bannister, one of the twentieth century’s greatest sports champions, proved that “the human spirit is indomitable.”

Bibliography

Bale, John. Roger Bannister and the Four-Minute Mile. Routledge, 2004.

Bannister, Roger. The Four-Minute Mile. Lyons Press, 2004.

Collins, Caroline. “Roger Bannister’s American Image.” Sport in History, vol. 26, no. 2, 2006, pp. 248–62.

Denison, Jim. Bannister and Beyond: The Mystique of the Four-Minute Mile. Breakaway Books, 2003.

Krüger, Arnd. “Training Theory and Why Roger Bannister Was the First Four-Minute Miler.” Sport in History, vol. 26, no. 2, 2006, pp. 305–24.

Litsky, Frank, and Bruce Weber. "Roger Bannister, First Athlete to Break the 4-Minute Mile, Dies at 88." The New York Times, 4 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/obituaries/roger-bannister-dead.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.