How Roger Bannister left his everlasting impression on the four-minute mile

It’s coming up on 30 years since our graduation day, and what also must have been one of my last idle afternoon wanderings into College Hill Bookstore in Providence, in May of 1994. The best of times and the end of innocence.

Being stone broke and in debt there was no hope of purchasing anything, until there on the Just Published shelf, as if somehow illuminated before me, was The Four-Minute Mile by Roger Bannister, the 40th anniversary edition. The urge to buy it proved irresistible.

Like Zatopek and Nurmi, the name Bannister only had to be heard about once, as if already existing in the subconscious of the runner’s mind, without the need for any guarantee of validity.

“Ladies and gentleman . . . the time is three . . .” and with that Bannister’s epic race against time was finally won, his 3:59.4 set at Oxford’s Iffley Road track, on the Thursday evening of May 6th, 1954.

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In the long history of sporting barriers, the four-minute mile was one of the greatest in the physical and psychological sense – broken at last by a 25-year-old medical student from London. Some said he might kill himself and it wasn’t entirely inconceivable, Bannister’s gallant attempt at immortality a step too far into the unknown. Such was the mystique surrounding the four-minute mile.

What would have been inconceivable in 1994 was the idea that, 10 years later, Bannister would be sitting before me, on the then 50th anniversary of his utterly pivotal four-lap run. Blame that on a simple twist of fate, and I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about Bannister again this week, as his famous milestone reaches 70 years of age this Monday.

Of all the great runners I’ve been fortunate to meet and interview in the years before or since – from our own Delany, Coghlan, O’Sullivan and Treacy, to Coe, Gebrselassie, Tergat, Bekele, you know who they are – few if any made such a first and lasting impression as Bannister did.

It was May 2004, in a small upstairs suite at the Westbury Hotel in Dublin, kindly arranged by the Irish Milers Club, who had invited Bannister to an open conversation later that evening. There was some gently irony in that behind his charming modesty, the gentleman and gentle man, here was one of the toughest athletes to ever step foot on a running track.

Rereading the interview again, there was a reminder too that such was his enduring humility, the last thing Bannister wanted to talk about was running. Then aged 75, with his still unmistakably rangy athletic looks, he sat for an hour or so, and he talked almost entirely unprompted, his energy and warmth increasingly infectious. Occasionally his wife, Moyra, interrupted with some details, while also sketching a portrait of me (certainly a first and last).

When eventually pressed on his historic run, Bannister would almost jokingly reminisce; how he still had the shoes and the vest but lost the number; how someone handed him a jar of the old cinders when the track was later torn up.

“No, it wasn’t something I’d always aspired to do. I was really doing it as preparation for the Empire Games later that summer. I’d failed in the Helsinki Olympics in 1952, where I’d planned to retire. I thought I had it all worked out. Gold medallist, 1,500m, now get on with the medicine . . .”

That “failure” in Helsinki is some exaggeration, given he finished a close fourth behind Josef Barthel from Luxembourg, not helped when Bannister’s meticulous race preparations were upset by the late addition of a semi-final round. Not that this dented his Corinthian spirit and complete sportsmanship, and he later wrote of Barthel’s success in The Four-Minute Mile: “In the great joy of that single moment the agony of the previous week was forgotten . . . I found new meaning in the Olympic words that the important thing was not the winning but the taking part.”

Still, it was only after finishing fourth in those Olympics that he drifted towards the seemingly unachievable goal. So for the weeks and days leading up to May 1954, he perfected every last detail of his interval training at the old Paddington Recreation Ground in London, before making the hour-long train ride to Oxford. He also recalled, as mad as it sounds now, how he took a complete rest for the five days beforehand.

Perhaps equally inconceivable by modern sporting standards, Bannister ran just two more major races in the 1954 season – then retired. He beat John Landy in an epic duel over the mile to win the British Empire Games in Vancouver, then won the European 1,500m title in Bern.

His 3:59.4 was a breakthrough in other ways too; just 46 days later Landy improved Bannister’s world record to 3:58.0, and history or the world hardly noticed. In 1955, three men ran under four minutes in the one race, and by June 1956, Ireland also had its first sub-four-minute miler in Ronnie Delany, who ran 3:59.0 in California, six months before he won the Olympic 1,500m in Melbourne.

Since Bannister’s time, only 13 men have improved the world mile record, 18 times between them. Hicham El Guerrouj’s current mark of 3:43.13 turns 25-years-old this summer. There are various theories as to why that has lasted so long, but it’s worth remembering too that Ray Flynn’s Irish mile record of 3:49.77 turns 42 this summer.

Some people argue the four-minute mile has lost much of its magic or lure yet, since Bannister’s time, in all only 59 Irish men have broken it, 15 of which were run since 2021 (and four so far this year), coinciding with the introduction of the so-called “super spikes” built on carbon-plating and super-bouncy foam.

In their own different way that links them all back to Bannister, who died in Oxford on March 3rd, 2018, 20 days before his 89th birthday.

There’s another everlasting impression of my meeting with him in 2004 when, for the first time either before or since, I felt compelled to end an interview by asking for his autograph, pulling out that same 40th edition of The Four-Minute Mile, and asking might he perhaps sign it.

I can still see his look of sheer delight and pleasure.

With best wishes, Roger Bannister