Sir Roger Bannister, First Athlete to Break 4-Minute Mile, Dies at 88
As the year went on, he would face far stiffer competition,
but with Brasher (later an Olympic steeplechase champion) and Chataway (later the world record holder at 5,000 meters) enlisted as his supporting cast, he chose May 6 and the familiar Iffley Road track, where he’d run as an Oxford man himself, as the time and place for his assault on the four-minute mark.
Sports Illustrated called him “among the most private of public men, inexhaustibly polite, cheerfully distant, open and complex.”
His 1955 memoir — called “The Four-Minute Mile,” and reissued 50 years later as “The
First Four Minutes” — amounted to a portrait of the athlete as a young artist.
“He was running on 28 training miles a week,” Sebastian Coe, who set the world record in the mile three different times, once said.
When he returned to London, however, his school there prized sports like rowing
and rugby above running, and his racing career stalled until he entered Oxford University, where, at 17, he was introduced to spiked shoes and ran his first mile in 4:53.
Landy said afterward, “When I looked ’round in the final back straight and he was still with me, I knew it was curtains.”
Bannister later said that Vancouver had been a more satisfying race than the celebrated one at Iffley Road
because it was a victory achieved against a great competitor and not merely against a clock.
Paced by Chataway and Brasher and powered by an explosive kick, his signature, Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes — 3:59.4, to
be exact — becoming the first man ever to do so, breaking through a mystical barrier and creating a seminal moment in sports history.