The Madras Courier published this feature by me after his death. After I sent him to Oxtopia, he began work on his memoir and I was privileged to review Twin Tracks. Roger not only spoke at the launch of Oxford Castaways but attended the launch of all three of my castaway books. I told the above story and introduced Mike to his hero: an unforgettable tear-jerker of a moment. He not only graced the launch of, Oxford Castaways, in 2012 but made the closing speech.
How wonderful that Sir Roger allowed me to cast him away on my mythical island of Oxtopia. It was truly inspirational and had signalled the idea that all things were possible, although the possibility that I would meet Roger Bannister was absurd. Mike and I had watched Roger’s achievement on the seven-inch TV. He took my eighteen-month-old son Justin onto the Iffley Road cinder track and they both ran a lap savouring the memory of May 6, 1954. After ten years in Australia he made it back to the UK on holiday.
Watched by about 3,000 spectators, he smashed the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. A mere 250 yards from the tape he showed signs of flagging, and Bannister burst ahead with one of his famous last-ditch sprints, passing Chataway to leap at the tape – and become the world’s first four-minute miler.On this day in history-May 6 1954-Oxford graduate Roger Bannister became the first person in the world to break the four-minute mile, at the Iffley Road Track. When he faltered, Chataway moved ahead of Bannister to act as a “pacer,” although he doubted his own ability to keep it up. The race began.īrasher set the pace for two and a half laps. runners, Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher, had agreed to help him, and the story soon spread round the crowd that Bannister was going to try for a new record. to run against his old University, it seemed fitting to try to break the world mile record on the track where at seventeen his running career had begun. But he believed that in the end it was the mind which made a runner win.Įven after the Amateur Athletics Association selected him as a promising athlete, Bannister’s examinations came first and running second.
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He taught himself special breathing control and learned how to improve an already excellent heart-beat. His medical knowledge helped him to discover that not only had he a longer stride than most runners, but that his lungs absorbed an abnormal rate of oxygen. Sickly as a boy, Bannister had proved an unexpectedly good athlete at Oxford, where he studied medicine. tall Bannister had been quietly training himself to break the record, using a local track in the lunch-break between studies at St. He has run the mile in four minutes – 3 minutes 59.4 to be exact – on the Iffley Road track at Oxford on May 6, 1954.Įver since the Swedish athlete Gundar Haegg had run the mile in 4 minutes 1.4 in 1945, trainers had argued over the possibility of breaking the four-minute barrier. Dimly he hears the crowd roar, then his legs buckle and he collapses, semi-conscious and near-blind for a moment, into the arms of two officials.īannister, a twenty-five year old medical student from a London hospital, has achieved what the experts declared to be impossible. The last few seconds seem a thousand years to Roger Bannister, as he hurls himself desperately forward at the tape. But his mind forces his legs to pound on. Roger Bannister crosses the line after running the first four-minute mile in 1954, by Pat Nicolle
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