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Roger Bannister, First to Break Four-Minute Mile, Dies at 88

Roger Bannister, Runner Who Broke Four-Minute Mile, Dies at 88

(Bloomberg) -- Roger Bannister, the U.K. athlete who as a medical student six decades ago became the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes, has died. He was 88.

He died Saturday in Oxford, England, according to the Associated Press, citing a family statement. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011.

Roger Bannister, First to Break Four-Minute Mile, Dies at 88

At a time when the sub-four-minute mile was a goal of elite runners -- and one that skeptics considered a barrier that the human body couldn’t overcome -- Bannister made history in a race on May 6, 1954, at Oxford University in England.

The four-lap contest between Oxford and a British Amateur Athletic Association team around the quarter-mile Iffley Road Track took place in what the New York Times called “exceedingly unfavorable conditions” -- a 15 mile-per-hour crosswind, with gusts of 25 mph. Bannister had elected to rest for five days before the race to make an assault on four minutes, and he opted to stick with the plan to go all out for the record.

As Frank Deford later wrote in Sports Illustrated magazine: “He decided that a man in England would never get anything done if he waited for good weather.”

With pacing help from teammates Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, Bannister ran the first lap in 57.5 seconds, the next two in a little over a minute each. Bannister later wrote of the final moments of the race: “I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well.”

‘Pretty Tired’

His fourth lap, in 58.9 seconds, gave him a final time of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. He had smashed the world record of 4 minutes, 1.4 seconds, set almost nine years earlier by Gunder Haegg of Sweden.

“I felt pretty tired at the end, but I knew that I would just about make it,” he told reporters.

The 25-year-old Bannister had reached “one of man’s hitherto unattainable goals,” the New York Times reported the next day. “The four-minute time sought by every great miler for 20 years was beaten by the slim, sandy-haired medical student in a dual meet at Oxford University.”

Bannister’s 3:59:4 stood as the record for less than two months, until Australian John Landy ran a mile in 3:57.9 in Finland.

Six weeks later, on Aug. 7, 1954, Bannister and Landy faced off at the British Empire Games in Vancouver. Bannister, known for strong finishes, passed Landy in the final turn to win what became known as the “Miracle Mile.” Both men had again bested four minutes: Bannister’s time was 3:58:8, Landy’s 3:59.6.

‘Sportsman’ Honor

That same year, 1954, Bannister won gold in the 1,500 meters at the European Championships. Sports Illustrated named him its first “Sportsman of the Year.”

Bannister, who was knighted in 1975, went on to a career as a neurologist and watched through the years as other runners ran ever-swifter miles. Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj set the current record, 3:43:13, in 1999 in Rome.

“It will go on being broken until it gets down to 3:30,” Bannister said in an interview with the Independent newspaper in 2004. “Since I did it, it has gone down a third of a second a year, on average. It is now down to 3:43. But, without cheating with drugs, I don’t think anyone will ever beat 3:30.”

Roger Gilbert Bannister was born March 23, 1929, in Harrow, near London. He was a boy who “just ran anywhere and everywhere -- never because it was an end in itself, but because it was easier for me to run than to walk,” Bannister wrote in “The First Four Minutes,” his 1995 memoir.

Oxford Scholarship

He attended schools in London and Bath, proving himself a skilled student and runner and earning a scholarship to Oxford University, where he studied medicine while continuing to shine in mile and 1,500-meter track competitions.

He entered the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki as the U.K. record-holder in the mile, finishing a disappointing fourth in the 1,500-meter run.

At St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, Bannister turned the focus of his athletic training to the four-minute mile. He was in his final year as a clinical student when he broke that barrier.

After retiring from competitive racing, Bannister spent two decades as a neurologist in private practice, then turned full-time to research, specializing in autonomic failure -- illness characterized by the failure of the central nervous system to respond automatically to stimuli.

He wrote or edited medical texts such as “Brain and Bannister’s Clinical Neurology” in 1992. With his wife, Moyra Jacobsson, a portrait painter and daughter of a Swedish economist, he had four children.

Sports Council

He remained interested in sports and, in 1971, became the first head of the U.K.’s Sports Council, which started testing athletes for steroids. He was president of the International Council for Sport and Physical Recreation from 1976 to 1983.

When a 1975 car accident injured his ankle and put a stop to his running, he turned to cycling for exercise.

Bannister returned to Oxford in 1985 to become Master of Pembroke College, a position he held until 1993. The American Academy of Neurology gave him an award for lifetime achievement in 2005.

He long maintained that the most important mark he made was not in running, but in medicine.

“That to me is a greater source of satisfaction than happening to move my body at a certain speed for a few moments in 1954,” he said in a 2012 interview with the New York Times.

In a BBC radio documentary in May 2014, Bannister revealed he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease three years earlier. “Life has its physical challenges, but I take every day as it comes,” he said.

--With assistance from Christopher Elser

To contact the reporter on this story: Laurence Arnold in Washington at larnold4@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brian Lysaght at blysaght@bloomberg.net, Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, David Henry, Steven Gittelson

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