Four minutes of fame

Even a short walk down the passage, to the loo in Sir Roger Bannister’s house in Oxford, offers a reminder. In a grainy photograph on the wall Winston Churchill, wearing a polka dot bow tie and clutching a cigar in his meaty hand, welcomes the 25-year-old runner and his two friends to Downing Street.

Bannister, Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway are dressed in white tracksuits which make them look more like village cricketers than exceptional athletes.

Next week marks the 50th anniversary of their legendary race. On May 6 1954, with Brasher and Chataway as his pacemakers, Bannister shattered 20th-century sport’s most symbolic barrier by running the mile in three minutes 59,4 seconds.

The romantic celebrations have already resumed. Bannister, however, reacts with charming scepticism when told that a recent radio poll acclaimed his run at Iffley Road in Oxford as sport’s greatest-ever achievement.

‘It’s pretty arbitrary, isn’t it,” he shrugs. ‘Who decides these things?”

He leans over and gives my arm a comforting squeeze. ‘That’s not to say you’re not all great people but, oh dear, this sounds like the work of three journalists in a pub. They probably said, ‘Well, should we go for Jonny Wilkinson’s drop goal or the old boy Bannister?’ What does it really mean?”

There are times when I feel like giving the old boy a congratulatory squeeze myself, as he resists all attempts to elevate his first sub-four-minute mile to anything more than another world record-breaking race. While the four-minute mark is, as even Bannister concedes, ‘irresistible”, the 75-year-old is at his most intriguing when he considers the impact of the race on the rest of his life as a neurologist.

As we step into his old red Volvo and head for the Iffley Road, I ask Bannister if he ever regrets having been the first to reach the miler’s holy grail. ‘For more than a decade,” he says slowly, as if measuring that length of time compared to the four minutes it took to make his name famous, ‘it was a severe handicap to me. I ran my last serious race later that year, in 1954, and I would say it was only in 1965 that I really won a far more difficult battle.

‘I had always wanted to become a neurologist, which is one of the most demanding vocations in medicine. Where do you stop, after all, with the brain? How does it function? What are its limits? The work seems unending. After qualifying as a doctor you face nine more years of training. There were only 170 neurologists in Britain then and, whether spoken or unspoken, there was this insidious feeling. How can Bannister, a mere athlete, probably spoilt by all the publicity and fame, dare aspire to neurology? But I’d done a lot of research and my academic record was very good. So I had to alter the perception people had of me in my profession by being totally dedicated.

‘I remember being invited to the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, and turning it down. I could just imagine these brain specialists stalking the hospital corridors and asking, ‘Where’s this Bannister fellow?’ As soon as someone said, ‘Oh, he’s in Toyko’, it would’ve felt as if they’d been right about me all along. I was nothing but a runner.”

Turning right off Iffley Road and heading down to the track, we pass Bannister Close — a road named after four minutes of running rather than 40 years of work on the brain. But, in thrall to sport, we cannot help ourselves as the story of the race rises up again in such a nostalgic setting. We rush through the clubhouse, with Bannister sweeping past the blown-up front page of the Daily Mail from May 7 1954, which hails him as ‘Britain’s Jolly Roger”.

Today he is wearing a hat and a coat, and walks with a pronounced limp caused by a car accident in 1975 that ended even the casual jogging he loved as a retired runner. We hit the track and scurry towards the finish line. Apart from the inevitable change in surface, and the modest replacement of a rickety wooden stand, Iffley Road looks the same as it did 50 years ago.

‘This is strange,” Bannister says, ‘but today is very similar to the day of the race. It was this cold and windy.”

Bannister looks back at a church which rises up against another grey English sky. ‘Actually, that’s different. There’s no flag. In 1954 I watched the flapping of the St George’s flag on top of that church and worried myself half to death about whether the wind would ruin everything.”

Bannister’s day had begun, as usual, in his research laboratory where he sharpened his spikes. ‘I remember a medical colleague scoffing, ‘you don’t think that’s going to make a difference do you, old boy?’ He didn’t understand I was looking for anything which might shave 0,01 seconds off my time.”

Later that morning, in stark contrast to the pampered world of professional sport today, Bannister travelled alone from Paddington to Oxford by train, settling into his seat in second class.

We relive the race. The decision to ‘go for it despite a gusting wind”, which meant he had to run the equivalent of three minutes 56 seconds on a fine day, was followed by the sound of the gun.

For almost three-quarters of a mile Bannister ran with effortless power, his desire to increase the pace curbed by Brasher and Chataway, who led him expertly around in 3min 0,7sec. A 59-second last lap would make history.

‘I knew what it meant,” Bannister says, as he looks back over the half-century separating him from those 59 seconds. The old man discards his hat and coat and allows me to carry them. With just a few yards separating him from the imaginary finish, he tilts back his head in a reflection of his famous finish. With mouth open and arms pumping silently, he shows me what he looked like in close up 50 years ago. ‘And then,” he sighs as he crosses the line with a creaking step, ‘it was over.”

In his thoughtful and now re-released book, The First Four Minutes, Bannister wrote that in the next moment, ‘pain overtook me. I felt like an exploded flashlight with no will to live.”

He smiles shyly at the purple prose. ‘I was always interested in writing, and I tried to capture that feeling inside me. People still say, ‘did you actually mean to do it?’ It’s as if they imagine I woke one morning and thought, ‘should I go punting on the river or run a four-minute mile?’ They don’t know I had run 20 000 miles in eight years of preparation. So yes, I really was trying.”

Yet Bannister relishes the suggestion that he was actually at his peak as a runner three months later on August 7 1954, when he defeated John Landy, his formidable Australian rival, at the British Empire Games in Vancouver. Landy, now the governor-general of Victoria, had run the mile four times in less than 4min 3sec earlier that year. He finally went under four minutes on June 21, smashing Bannister’s already legendary world record after just 46 days. ‘Landy and I raced each other seven weeks later. If I had lost, breaking four minutes before him would have meant nothing. The pressure was unbearable.”

Bannister tracks the twists and turns of that far greater race in long and looping sentences, explaining how, once Landy had opened up a 15-yard lead after two laps, he reeled him in through sheer will. ‘I beat him on the last bend, when he made the mistake of looking back. We had both broken four minutes again and set a new world record. I can be a little clinical about the first four-minute mile — but not that run. Beating John Landy was my defining race.”

The current world record for the mile, held by Hicham El Guerrouj, is 3min 43sec. Bannister believes that ‘they might lower it to three minutes 30 seconds in another 50 years. But that would be the absolute limit. I cannot imagine a man running under the three-minute mark — without drugs at least. One simply hopes that this Pandora’s box of biological treatments can be stopped — because, in theory, it’s possible to alter the human body by using drugs to make muscles grow bigger. The record wouldn’t matter then.”

As the Volvo eases back into his drive, Bannister makes one of his many unstoppable changes of conversation. He reveals that, soon after starting at nursery school, his grandson began to trumpet the family’s proud sporting legacy. ‘He told everyone his old grandad had run the mile in four seconds! I liked that. Drug-free, too!”

Unlike so many iconic figures, defined by a single incident in their lives, Bannister has not shrunk beneath the four-minute mile. As a grandfather and a neurologist, a sports administrator and a runner, he can look forward calmly to the 50th anniversary while remembering some more important friends.

Norris McWhirter, the timekeeper on that famous evening and founder of the Guinness Book of Records, died last Monday. ‘I knew him for 56 years. We had dinner the night before the London Marathon and then, two days later, he dropped dead on the tennis court. It was a terrible shock. Norris always fed me information about Landy’s times, reminding me how close he was to four minutes. He was very important — just behind Brasher and Chataway.”

Chris Brasher, who dreamed up the London Marathon, died last year. The Iffley Road gang of four is down to just two — Chataway and Bannister.

‘While the four-minute mile was important to me once,” Bannister says, ‘it’s now in the back of my mind. The real result turned out to be the wonderful, lifelong friendships I had with Brasher and Chataway. They were formed in the fire of passion and effort, and sustained amid the reverses we all had.

‘So the race taught us we could do most things we turned our minds to in later life. And it made us friends. I shall think of that more than anything next week.” —