The Perfect Mile

The ideals of that bygone age – esprit de corps, self-control, dignity, tireless effort, fair play, and discipline – were often credited to the country’s long sporting tradition. It was said that throughout the empire’s history, ‘England has owed her sovereignty to her sports.’ Yet even in sport she had recently faltered. The 1948 Olympic Games in London had begun badly when the Olympic flame was accidentally snuffed out on reaching England from Greece. America (the ‘United, Euphoric, You-name-it-they-had-it States’ as writer Peter Lewis put it) dominated the games, winning thirty-eight gold medals to Britain’s three. After that the country had to learn the sour lesson of being a ‘good loser’ in everything from football and cricket to rugby, boxing, tennis, golf, athletics, even swimming the Channel. It looked as though the quintessential English amateur – one who played his sport solely for the enjoyment of the effort and never at the cost of a complete life – simply couldn’t handle the competition. He now looked outdated, inadequate, and tired. For a country that considered its sporting prowess symbolic of its place in the world, this was a distressing situation.

Roger Bannister, born into the last generation of the age that ended with George VI’s death, typified the gentleman amateur. He didn’t come from a family with a long athletic tradition, nor one in which it was assumed he would go to Oxford, as he did, to study medicine and spend late afternoons at Vincent’s, the club whose hundred members represented the university’s elite.

His father, Ralph, was the youngest of eleven children raised in Lancashire, the heart of the English cotton industry and an area often hit by depression. Ralph left home at 15, took the British Civil Service exams, qualified as a low-level clerk, and moved to London. Over a decade later, after working earnestly within the government bureaucracy, he felt settled enough to marry. He met his wife Alice on a visit back to Lancashire, and on 23 March 1929 she gave birth to their first son and second child, Roger Gilbert. The family lived in a modest home in Harrow, north-west London. Forced to abandon their education before reaching university (his mother had worked in a cotton mill), Roger’s parents valued books and learning above everything else. All Roger knew of his father’s athletic interests was that he had once won his school mile and then fainted. Only later in life did he learn that his father carried the gold medal from that race on his watch chain.

Bannister discovered the joy of running on his own while playing on the beach. ‘I was startled and frightened,’ he later wrote of his sudden movement forward on the sand in bare feet. ‘I glanced round uneasily to see if anyone was watching. A few more steps – self-consciously … the earth seemed almost to move with me. I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body.’ Apart from an early passion for moving quickly, nothing out of the ordinary marked his early childhood. He spent the years largely alone, building models, imagining heroic adventures, and dodging neighbourhood bullies, like many boys his age.

When he was 10 this world was broken; an air-raid siren sent him scrambling back to his house with a model boat secured under his arm. The Luftwaffe didn’t come that time, but soon they would. His family evacuated to Bath, but no place was safe. One night, when the sirens sounded and the family took refuge underneath the basement stairs of their new house, a thundering explosion shook the walls. The roof caved in around them, and the Bannister family had to escape to the woods for shelter.

Although the war continued to intrude on their daily lives, mostly in the form of ration books and blacked-out windows, Roger had other problems. As an awkward, serious-minded 12-year-old who was prone to nervous headaches, he had trouble fitting in among the many strangers at his new school in Bath. He won acceptance by winning the annual cross-country race. The year before, after he had finished eighteenth, his house captain had advised him to train, which Bannister had done by running the two-and-a-half-mile course at top speed a couple of times a week. The night before the race the following year he was restless, thinking about how he would chase the ‘third form giant’ who was the favourite. The next day Bannister eyed his rival, noting his cockiness and general state of unfitness. When the race started, he ran head down and came in first. His friends’ surprise would have been trophy enough, but somehow this race seemed to right the imbalance in his life as well. Soon he was able to pursue his studies, as well as interests in acting, music, and archaeology, without feeling at risk of being an outcast – as long as he kept winning races. Possessed of a passion for running, a surfeit of energy, and a preternatural ability to push himself, he won virtually all of them, usually wheezing for breath by the end.

Before he left Bath to attend the University College School in London, the headmaster warned, ‘You’ll be dead before you’re 21 if you go on at this rate.’ His new school had little regard for running, and Bannister struggled to find his place once again. He was miserable. He tried rugby but wasn’t stocky or quick enough; he tried rowing but was placed on the third eight. After a year he wanted out, so at 16 he sat for the Cambridge University entrance exam. At 17 he chose to take a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, since Cambridge had put him off for a year. He never had a problem knowing what he wanted.

Bannister intended to study to become a doctor, but he knew he needed a way not only to fit in but to excel among his fellow students, most of whom, in 1946, were eight years older than he, having deferred placement because of the war. A schoolboy among ex-majors and brigadiers, he realised that running was his best chance to distinguish himself. The year before, his father had taken him to see the gutsy, diminutive English miler Sydney Wooderson take on the six-foot giant Arne Andersson at the first international athletics competition since the war’s end. White City stadium, located in west London, was bedlam as Andersson narrowly beat Wooderson. ‘If there was a moment when things began, that was it for me,’ Bannister later said. In a foot race, unlike other sports, greatness could be won with sheer heart. He sensed he had plenty of that.

Before he even unpacked his bags at Oxford, Bannister sought out athletes at the track. He found no one there, but discovered a notice on a college bulletin board for the University Athletic Club. He promptly mailed a guinea to join but received no response. He decided to go running on the track anyway, even though one of the groundskeepers advised, ‘I’m afraid that you’ll never be any good. You just haven’t got the strength or the build for it.’ Apparently the groundskeeper thought everyone needed to look like Jack Lovelock, the famous Oxford miler: short, compact, with thick, powerful legs. The long-limbed, almost ungainly Bannister persisted nonetheless. Three weeks later, having finally received his membership card, he entered the Freshman’s Sport mile wearing an oil-spotted jersey from his rowing days. He thought it best to lead from the start – a strategy he would afterwards discard – and finished the race in second place with a time of 4:52. After the race, the secretary of the British Olympic Association advised him, ‘Stop bouncing, and you’ll knock twenty seconds off.’ Bannister had never before worn running spikes, and their grip on the track had made him, as he later described, ‘over-stride in a series of kangaroo-like bounds’.

The cruel winter of 1946–7, with its ten-foot snowdrifts, meant that someone had to shovel out a path on the track so the athletes could train; Bannister took to the yeoman’s task, and for his effort won a third-string spot in the Oxford versus Cambridge mile race on 22 March 1947. On that dreary spring day, on the very track at White City where he had watched Wooderson compete, Bannister discovered his true gift for running. He stepped up to the mark feeling the pressure to run well against his university’s arch rival. From the start Bannister held back, letting the others set the pace. The track was wet, and the front of his singlet was spotted black with cinder ash kicked up by the runners ahead of him. After the bell for the final lap, Bannister was exhausted but still close enough to the leaders to finish respectably. All of a sudden, though, he was overwhelmed by a feeling that he just had to win. It was instinct, a ‘crazy desire to overtake the whole field’, as he later explained. Through a cold, high wind on the back straight, he increased the tempo of his stride, and to everyone’s shock, team-mates and competitors alike, he surged past on the outside. In the effort inspired by the confluence of body and will, he felt more alive than ever before. He pushed through the tape twenty yards ahead of the others in 4:30.8. It wasn’t the time that mattered, rather the rush of passing the field with his long, devouring stride. This was ecstasy, and it was the first time Bannister knew for sure there was something remarkable in the way he ran – and something remarkable in the feeling that went with it.

After the race he met Jack Lovelock, the gold medallist in the 1,500m at the 1936 Olympics and the former world record holder in the mile. ‘You mean the Jack Lovelock,’ Bannister said on being introduced. Lovelock was a national hero, Exeter graduate, doctor, and blessed with tremendous speed. It didn’t take much insight on his part to see in Bannister the potential resurrection of British athletics.

Bannister didn’t disappoint. On 5 June he clocked a 4:24.6 mile, beating the time set by his hero Wooderson when he was the same age, 18. In the summer Bannister travelled with the English team on its first post-war international tour, putting in several good runs. In November he was selected as a ‘possible’ for the 1948 Olympics, then turned down the invitation. He wasn’t ready, he decided, to some criticism.

It was in his nature to listen to his own counsel, not that of others. He had taken a coach, Bill Thomas, who had once trained Lovelock, but Bannister soon became disgruntled with him. Thomas attended to Bannister on the track while wearing a bowler hat, suit and waistcoat. He barked instructions at the miler on how to hold his arms or how many laps to run during training. When the young miler asked for the reasoning behind the lessons, Thomas simply replied, ‘Well, you do this because I’m the coach and I tell you.’ When Bannister ran a trial and enquired about his time, Thomas said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Soon Bannister dropped him, preferring to discover for himself how to improve his performances.

The next year he became Oxford Athletic Club secretary, then quickly its president. He won the Oxford versus Cambridge meet for the second year; he competed in the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) championships in the summer, learning the ropes of first-class competition. Increasingly the newspapers headlined his name. He even saved the day at the opening ceremony for the Olympics when it was discovered that the British team hadn’t been given a flag with which to march into the stadium. Bannister found the back-up flag, smashing the window of the commandant’s car with a brick to retrieve it.

Four years later, he intended to save the British team’s honour again.

Roger Bannister’s preparations for the Helsinki Games began in the autumn of 1950. He had spent the two previous years studying medicine, soaking up university life, hitch-hiking from Paris to Italy, and going on running tours to America, Greece, and Finland. His body filled out. He won some races and lost others but, importantly, he turned himself from an inexperienced, weedy kid into a young man who clearly understood that Oxford and running had opened up worlds to him that otherwise would have remained closed. He was ready to make his Olympic bid, and afterwards to put away his racing spikes for a life devoted to medicine.

Bannister’s plan was to spend one year competing against the best international middle-distance runners in the world, learning their strengths and weaknesses and acclimatising to different environments. Then, in the year before the Games, he would focus exclusively on training to his peak, running in only a few races so as not to take off his edge. The plan was entirely his own. Having spoken to Lovelock about his preparations for the 1936 Olympics, Bannister felt he needed no other guidance.

First he flew to New Zealand over Christmas for the Centennial Games, where he beat the European 1,500m champion Willi Slijkhuis and the Australian mile champion Don Macmillan, both of whom he was likely to face in Helsinki. His mile time was down to 4:09.9, a reduction of more than forty seconds from his first Oxford race three years earlier. While in New Zealand he visited the small village school Lovelock had attended, noticing that the sapling given to the Olympic gold medal winner had now grown into an oak tree. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him. Back in England Bannister continued his fellowship in medicine through the spring of 1951 at Oxford, where he investigated the limits of human endurance and chatted with such distinguished lecturers as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He then flew to Philadelphia to compete in the Benjamin Franklin Mile, the premier American event in middle-distance running. The press fawned over this foil to the American athlete, commenting on his travelling alone to the event: ‘No manager, no trainer, no masseur, no friends! He’s nuts – or he’s good.’ In front of forty thousand American fans, Bannister crushed the country’s two best milers in a time of 4:08.3. The New York Herald Tribune described him as the ‘worthy successor to Jack Lovelock’. The New York Times quoted one track official as saying, ‘He’s young, strong and fast. There’s no telling what he can do.’

The race brought Bannister acclaim back home. To beat the Americans on their own turf earned one the status of a national hero. When he followed with summer victories at the British Games and the AAA championships, it seemed track officials and the press were ready to award him the Olympic gold medal right then and there. They praised his training as ‘exceptional’, an ‘object lesson’. Of his long, fluid stride, the British press gushed that it was ‘immaculate’ and ‘amazing’. He left rivals standing; he was a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ on the track. After a race that left the crowd laughing at how effortlessly Bannister had won, a British official predicted, ‘Anyone who beats him in the Olympics at Helsinki will have to fly.’

Then the positive press turned quickly to the negative. Following his own plan, Bannister stopped running mile races at summer’s end. Tired from competition, he felt he had learned all he needed during the year and should now dedicate himself to training. When he chose to run the half-mile in an international meet, the papers attacked: ‘Go Back to Your Own Distance, Roger’. This was only the beginning of the criticism, but Bannister remained focused on his goal.

To escape the attention, he journeyed to Scotland to hike and sleep under the stars for two weeks. One late afternoon, after swimming in a lake, he began to jog around to ease his chill. Soon enough he found himself running for the sheer exhilaration of it, across the moor and towards the coast. The sky was filled with crimson clouds, and as he ran, a light rain started to fall. With the sun still warming his back, a rainbow appeared in front of him, and he seemed to run towards it. Along the coast the rhythm of the water breaking against the rocks eased him, and he circled back to where he had begun. Cool, wet air filled his lungs. Running into the sun now, he had trouble seeing the ground underneath his feet, but still he rushed forward, alive with the movement. Finally spent as the sun disappeared from the horizon, he tumbled down a slight hill and rested on his back, his feet bleeding but feeling rejuvenated. He had needed to reconnect to the joy of running, away from the tyranny of the track.

Throughout the winter of 1951–2, Bannister immersed himself into his first year of medical school at St Mary’s Hospital in London, learning the basics of taking a patient history and working the wards. He was, by the way, also training for the Olympics. By the spring he had developed his stamina and began speed work on the track. When he announced that he wouldn’t defend his British mile championship, the athletics community objected. It was unthinkable. He had obligations to amateur sport; he had to prove he deserved his Olympic spot; he must take a coach now; he couldn’t duck his British rivals. Bannister made no big press announcements defending his reasons, he simply stuck to his plan, trusting it. As isolating as this plan was, so far it had taken him exactly where he wanted – so far. Meanwhile, most other athletes trained under the guidance and direction of the British amateur athletics officials.

On 28 May 1952, Bannister clocked a 1:53 half-mile at Motspur Park with his ‘space-eating stride’. Ten days later he entered the mile at the Inter-Hospitals Meet and won by 150 yards. Maybe he knew what he was doing. The press turned to writing that he would silence his critics at Helsinki and that his training was ‘well-advanced’. Compared to those of the top international 1,500m men, his times were sufficient. His ‘pulverizing last lap’ would likely win the day. Even L. A. Montague, the Manchester Guardian’s esteemed athletics correspondent, trotted out to explain that Bannister was the ‘more sensitive, often more intelligent, runner who burns himself up in giving of his best in a great race’. Bannister was Britain’s best chance at the gold medal, and Montague wondered, ‘Do [critics] really think that they suddenly know more about him than he knows himself?’

Although he lost an 800m race at White City stadium in early July, the headlines exclaimed, ‘Don’t worry about Bannister’s defeat – he knows what he is doing!’ Ably assisted by the press, Bannister had painted himself into a corner. He was favoured to bring back gold by everyone from the head of the AAA to revered newspaper columnists – and, by association, by his countrymen as well. Of course, there weren’t going to be any scapegoats if he failed. ‘No alibis,’ as Bannister said himself. ‘Victory at Helsinki was the only way out.’ A part of him suspected that he had manoeuvred himself into this tight position on purpose. Come the Olympic final, he would have an expectant crowd, the rush of competition, two years of dedicated training, the expectation that it was his last race before retirement, and nobody to blame but himself if he lost. This was motivation.

By 17 July most of the British Olympic team had left for Finland, team manager Jack Crump declaring upon arrival in Helsinki, ‘We will not let Britain down.’ But, though he would have to join the team soon, Bannister was still in London. Like a few other athletes, he wanted to avoid the media frenzy in the prelude to the Games, and the inevitable waiting around, worrying about upcoming events. His friend Chris Chataway, the 5,000m hopeful, had also delayed his departure. The two scoured London for dark goggles to curtain the twenty-one hours of Scandinavian daylight. Given that one rarely saw the sun in London, it proved a difficult search. Bannister also sought out a morning newspaper.

It didn’t take him long to find a story headline – ‘Semi-Finals for the Olympic 1,500 Metres’ – that confirmed what Norris McWhirter had told him the day before about the added heat. ‘I could hardly believe it,’ Bannister later explained. ‘In just the length of time it took to read those few words the bottom had fallen out of my hopes.’ Worse, he had drawn a tough eliminating heat in the first round.

As he went about his day in the smog-choked London streets, the crisp air and fast tracks he expected to enjoy in Helsinki seemed threateningly close at hand. One could hardly have blamed him had he not wanted to go at all.

2

The essential thing in life is not so much conquering as fighting well.

Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games

In the narrow concrete tunnel, Wes Santee stuck to his position in the seven-man line, waiting to move forward as the first of the American team marched into Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium through the Marathon Gate. The applause from the stands reverberated in the tunnel, sounding as if the whole of mankind had come to watch the opening ceremony parade. Santee, his feet more accustomed to cowboy boots or track spikes, stepped ahead in white patent leather shoes. His outfit was a departure from his typical attire of Western shirts and jeans. Like the rest of his team-mates, he wore a dark flannel jacket with silver buttons, grey flannel slacks, and a poplin hat whose brim he had folded to make it look more like a cowboy hat.

The 20-year-old University of Kansas sophomore towered over most of those around him. At six foot one inch, with much of that height in his legs, he looked the clean-cut American athlete, buzz cut included. His shoulders were wide, and he bristled with energy. His face easily lit with a smile, and he almost always said what he thought, with a Midwestern twang. One had the sense that he wore his emotions out in the open, but that this vulnerability had a limit buttressed with steel.

That afternoon of 19 July 1952, he was nothing but a bundle of nervous anticipation as he moved towards the tunnel’s mouth. Rain streaked across the opening. He peered past it into the stadium, where hundreds of athletes circled the track. They were dressed in a kaleidoscope of colours and styles: pink turbans, flower-patterned shirts, green and gold blazers, black raincoats, orange hats. It was impossible to tell where each team was from because all the flag inscriptions were in Finnish. Santee could not even pronounce the translation for the United States: Yhdysvaltain. The Soviets were already settled on the infield, wearing their cream suits and maroon ties, lined up as neatly as an army regiment. It was their first Olympics since 1912, and they had made no secret of the fact that they were out to beat the Americans.

Finally Santee cleared the tunnel and moved in file towards the track, his head swivelling about to take in the three-tiered stadium and its seventy thousand spectators. It was an awesome sight, like nothing he had ever witnessed. So many people from so many places, charged with excitement and speaking so many different languages. And they had all come this afternoon simply to watch them march around the track, not even to see them compete. On an electric signboard, the likes of which Santee had seen only a few times, were the words Citius, Altius, Fortius – Faster, Higher, Stronger. He had made it. He was an Olympic athlete representing his country.

After marching around the mud-soaked track, he followed the row of athletes to his spot on the infield for the ceremony’s beginning. He felt as if his eyes weren’t wide enough to take in everything happening around him. This was a long way from Ashland, the farming town deep in the south-western part of Kansas where he was raised. The size of the Helsinki stadium alone was enough to marvel at. He remembered arriving at the University of Kansas for the first time and going to the big auditorium for freshman orientation. He’d been with his team-mate Lloyd Koby, who also came from the kind of small town where electricity was just on its way in and a rooster’s crow was the only wake-up call one knew. Koby had looked across the numerous tiers of seats, gauged the height of the rafters, turned to Santee, and said, ‘Boy, this building would hold a lot of hay.’ It was not so much a joke as the only context they knew. But that auditorium was nothing compared to this place, its steep concrete stands seeming to reach the sky.

At a rostrum on the track in front of Santee, the chairman of the organising committee began to speak, first in Finnish, then in Swedish, French, and English, about the Herculean efforts that had gone into these Games. His countrymen had cleared forests, put up hundreds of new buildings of stucco, granite, and steel, enlisted thousands of volunteers, and opened their homes to strangers from around the globe. The stadium in which the opening ceremony was taking place had been the chief target of Russian bombers at the start of the Second World War because of its symbolic value. Now it was once again alive with people, anxious for the competition to commence.