Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister CBE (born March 23, 1929) is a former British athlete best known as the first man to run the mile in less than four minutes. Bannister became a distinguished neurologist. He was born in Harrow, London, England.
This historic event took place on May 6, 1954 during a meet between British AAA and Oxford University at Iffley Road track in Oxford. It was watched by about 3,000 spectators. With winds up to 25 miles per hour (40 km/h) prior to the event, Bannister had said twice that he favored not running, to conserve his energy and efforts to break the 4-minute barrier; he would try again at another meet. However, the winds dropped just before the race was scheduled to begin, and Bannister did run. His time was 3 min 59.4 s. Two other runners, Chris Brasher, and Christopher Chataway, provided pacing; both went on to establish their own stellar track careers. The announcer for the race was Norris McWhirter, who went on to publish and edit the Guinness Book of Records.
Bannister's record-setting mile run was called the "Miracle Mile" because some doubted a four-minute-mile was physically possible for a man to achieve.
The claim that a four-minute mile was once thought to be impossible was and is a myth cooked up by sportswriters and debunked by Bannister himself in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile, 1955. The reason the myth took hold was that four minutes was a nice round number which was slightly better (about 1.5 seconds) than the world record for nine years -- longer than it probably otherwise would have been because of the effect of World War II in interrupting athletic progress in the combatant countries. Note that the Swedish runners Gunder Hagg and Arne Andersson, in a series of head-to-head races in the period 1942-45 lowered the world mile record by 5 seconds. See World record progression for the mile run. See also A World History of Track and Field Athletics, 1864-1964 by R.L. Quercetani, Oxford University Press, 1964 for a history of the mile/1500 m. event. What is still impressive to knowledgable track fans is that Bannister ran a four-minute mile on very low-mileage training by modern standards.
Just 46 days later on June 21 in Turku, Finland, Bannister's record was broken by his rival John Landy of Australia, with a time of 3 min 58 s.
On August 7, at the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, B.C., Bannister competed against Landy for the first time. They were the only two men in the world to have broken the 4 minute barrier, with John Landy still holding the world record. Landy led for most of the race, building a lead of 10 yards in the third lap (of four), but was overtaken on the last bend, and Bannister won in 3 min 58.8 s, with Landy 0.8 s behind in 3 min 59.6 s. Bannister and Landy have both pointed out that the crucial moment of the race was at the moment in which Bannister decided to try and pass Landy, Landy looked over his left shoulder to gauge Bannister's position, and Bannister burst past Landy on the right, never relinquishing the lead.
Bannister went on that season to win the "metric mile", the 1500 m, at the European Championships in Berne on 29 August, with a championship record in a time of 3 min 43.8 s. He then retired from athletics to concentrate on his work as a junior doctor and to pursue a career in neurology.
Bannister was the first recipient of Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsman of the Year" award. He later became the first Chairman of the Sports Council (now called Sport England) and was knighted for these services in 1975. Under his aegis, central and local government funding of sports centres and other sports facilities was rapidly increased, and he also initiated the first testing for use of anabolic steroids in sport. He became Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, retiring in 2001.
As a medical student at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, Roger Bannister chose to use his lunch hour for a 10 minute jog to Paddington track, where he ran 10 X 400 m in about 60 s with two minutes rest, then he ran back to work. The whole procedure took 48 minutes, leaving him 12 minutes to eat his lunch.
On the 50th anniversary of running the four minute mile, Bannister was interviewed by the BBC's sports correspondent Rob Bonnet. At the conclusion of the interview, Bannister was asked whether he looked back on the four minute mile as the most important achievement of his life. Bannister replied to the effect that 'no, he rather saw his subsequent forty years of practicing as neurologist and some of the new procedures he introduced as being more significant'. His major contribution in academic medicine was in the field of autonomic failure, an area of neurology focusing on illnesses characterized by certain automatic responses of the nervous system (for example, elevated heart rate when standing up) not occurring.
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