The Perfect Mile

Two thousand metres from the finish, the tactical race began. Schade, answering Zatopek’s taunt, burst into the lead, with Chataway and Reiff staying close behind. Zatopek faded. Then Pirie picked up his tempo, shifting easily past the Czech and the rest of the field. Schade quickly regained first position, pushing Pirie aside, then Mimoun started to make his move. With just over a lap to go it was Schade, Chataway, Mimoun, Zatopek and Pirie. At the bell, Zatopek kicked. From the stands the spectators could almost feel the excruciating effort required of him to make the move. But it was to no advantage. Chataway cruised past him a hundred metres down the track with Schade and Mimoun breathing down his neck. Zatopek trailed in fourth position, looking altogether finished. Schade then regained the lead, only to have Chataway steal it right back at the final turn.

‘ZAT-O-PEK! ZAT-O-PEK! ZAT-O-PEK!’ The cry erupted from the stands. The crowd was on its feet. Face twisted, mouth gaping, arms flailing, eyes open wide, Zatopek found another spurt. Suddenly Chataway caught the track’s edge with his foot and went crashing onto the red brick surface, churning up a cloud of dust behind him. Mimoun and Schade attempted to hold off Zatopek as he drove around the turn, but there was nothing they could do to keep him from victory. The crowd boomed again when the Czech sprinted down the straight. Every step looked like it would be his last, yet somehow he found a way to continue forward. He snapped the tape with a new Olympic record time, with Mimoun second, Schade third, Reiff fourth, Chataway fifth (after picking himself up off the track), and Perry in an exhausted sixth place.

Announcers, journalists, spectators, and athletes alike understood that they had just witnessed greatness in the form of Emil Zatopek. He had now claimed his second gold medal, and with his participation in the marathon a few days later, a race he had never run, Zatopek was proving he deserved the acclaim of being the finest distance runner since Nurmi. Although Perry had not medalled, he had run his best time, and Landy had to believe that his friend was proud simply to have competed in the same race as his hero Zatopek. Landy himself was impressed by the Czech’s tactical skill, but more than that, he had never seen someone with such overpowering physical fitness.

Everyone in the stadium was still revelling in Zatopek’s victory when the 1,500m qualifying rounds began. While Landy warmed up with a light jog on the infield, his countryman Don Macmillan placed fourth in his heat, qualifying for the semi-final the next day. Of the runners in the three heats before Landy’s who advanced to the next round, all had run better than his fastest 1,500m time. He had his work cut out for him.

Landy stepped up to the line. Three minutes and fifty-seven seconds later, his Olympic hopes were dashed. El Mabrouk came from behind to finish first with a time of 3:55.8, an unexceptional pace. McMillen, Bannister, and the Hungarian Tolgyesi followed him in, with Landy one second behind in fifth position. As Landy later described it, the last hundred metres of the race was a ‘mad scramble’, but he was too tired in the final straight to overtake Tolgyesi.

The Australian miler was disappointed in himself, regardless of his doubts before the race. He had travelled all this way and failed to make even the semi-finals. He knew the reason, too: since his good runs in England, he had come off his peak, a consequence of incomplete training. Cerutty took his athlete’s loss as a personal affront, and after the race he was not exactly comforting to Landy. The exact form of his vitriol is probably best left forgotten, but his coach’s general attitude towards Landy, rightly or wrongly, was that he lacked a ‘killer instinct’. And worse, throughout the Australian team, which was not performing well except for sprinters Shirley Strickland and Marjorie Jackson, there were grumblings that many athletes had not deserved to make the Olympics in the first place. In fact, the team manager issued a report after returning to Australia that bluntly stated, ‘No man or woman should be selected for future Australian teams who is not prepared to undergo a Spartan-like period of self-denial and rigorous training as practiced in other countries.’

Unfair as this attitude was, it stung Landy, who had been one of the last athletes to make the team. However, he refused to wallow in his failure to qualify for the 1,500m or 5,000m finals. He thought there was a lot he could learn while in Helsinki, especially from the athletes who had so far dominated the Games. The chance to observe Zatopek, for one, tempered the disappointment Landy felt.

Long before his 5,000m win and subsequent marathon victory, Zatopek was of interest to Landy. Cerutty often talked of him, and Les Perry idolised him because of his infamously hard training schedule and unrivalled record in distance running. When Perry first arrived in Helsinki, he had put on his tracksuit and run the three miles across to Otaniemi where the Iron Curtain countries were housed. Once past the guards at the gate, he’d found Zatopek down on the track and ran alongside him until he’d mustered the nerve to say, ‘I’m Les Perry from Australia.’ Zatopek had put his arm around the bespectacled fan and said in English, ‘You come from the other village to see me? You honour me! Join me. We will run together.’ After working out, they’d had a shower, dinner, and tea, then Zatopek had invited Perry to watch the Bolshoi Ballet performing in the camp. When Perry finally returned to Kapyla, he regaled his room-mates with the experience.

After his 1,500m loss, Landy made it his job to study other athletes at the old track near the stadium where they trained. He spent hours there, mentally noting how they ran and learning about their training methods. Zatopek, to whom Landy later referred as the ‘Piped [sic] Piper of Hamelin’, fascinated him the most. With a pack of other devotees at the track, Landy followed the Czech as he jogged forward and backward, speaking about running. There was much to take in and a lot to jot down afterwards because Zatopek talked almost as fast as he ran. He happily shared his love for the sport and spoke about how he had achieved so much since taking up running at the age of 19. ‘When I was in the 1950 European Championships …’ he began one story, talking about the race and the athletes he had competed against; ‘last year I was doing twenty by 400m in training …’ he revealed, or ‘I ran in the snow in my army boots …’ The Czech’s training methods were clearly based on making running a way of life. He believed in training one’s will power in small steps, every day. Discipline was the key. As for style, which he was accused of lacking, he was plainspoken: ‘I shall learn to have a better style once they start judging races according to their beauty. So long as it’s a question of speed, my attention will be directed to seeing how fast I can cover the ground.’

His three gold medals proved to Landy that Zatopek was on the right track. He wasn’t about antics, Eastern philosophy, recriminations, or wild theories – unlike Cerutty, who had Don Macmillan preparing for the 1,500m final by jogging around the track wearing two tracksuits and a towel wrapped around his head. Zatopek had devised schedules and methods of maintaining the balance between speed and endurance throughout the year. Landy liked this analytical approach. Cerutty disliked schedules: he felt they confined the soul. The two men were opposites, and Landy had the intelligence and independence to understand that all he owed his coach were his achievements to date. While in Helsinki, Landy plotted his future.

Roger Bannister was too exhausted to sleep. No amount of tossing, turning, shuffling, or kicking his feet against the sheets would allow him to drop off. Every second and minute brought the 1,500m final closer; every hour a new wave of anxiety swept over him. At 4.30 p.m. the next day he would line up against eleven of the best middle-distance runners in the world. His confidence was torn by having already run two races instead of the one he had expected to run to qualify for the final. He feared he was already beaten.

The past week had brought only restless days and nights. He and his room-mates – sprinter Nicholas Stacey, quarter-miler Alan Dick, and three-miler Chris Chataway – had tried to relieve the constant churning of their thoughts about victory or defeat, and about what would make the difference between the two. Resting on their unkempt beds, they spoke of politics and history, read books, or joked around with one another. One evening, Stacey mounted a wooden box, as if it was an Olympic podium, to accept his imaginary gold medal and offer a congratulatory speech. At other times they discussed their competitors, particularly Zatopek, whom they thought inhuman in ability. ‘While he goes for a twenty-mile training run on his only free day,’ Chataway said, ‘we lie here panting with exhaustion, moaning that the gods are unkind to us, and that we’re too intelligent to train hard. It’s all nonsense.’ Inevitably, the four thought again and again about that second when the starting gun would fire, and whether or not they would prove good enough. Regardless of what happened, they promised one another that once the Olympics had ended they would never put themselves through this torture again.

By the morning of Saturday, 26 July, Bannister was the only one of his room-mates still tense, though he tried not to show it, as far as possible keeping to himself his doubts about being able to win the race. The others had finished their events, nobody in triumph, and Chataway most disastrously, of course, by falling on the final lap of the 5,000m final. Bannister had watched the race, and its conclusion impressed on him how important his finishing kick would be.

Absence of victory was the same story for the entire British team. Just two days of competition remained on the track and in the field and they had won only a handful of medals, not one of them gold. Nor had any British athlete won gold in any of the other events. The British reporter who had said before the Games ‘I will eat a pair of spiked shoes if our team doesn’t win twelve gold medals’ was dangerously close to having a mouthful of leather. Headlines cried out ‘Don’t Worry, We Are Still in the Fight’, yet column after column reported failure and missed chances.

There was one hope left, though: Roger Bannister. Now, more than ever, his countrymen rallied around him. A few days before, the Daily Mirror columnist Tom Phillips had compared Bannister to a great racehorse trainer who ‘rarely bothered about picking minor honours here and there. If he wished to win a classic race, he got his horse perfectly fit for that day and nearly every time his horse was first past the post.’ Phillips concluded, ‘I believe Bannister will win and teach some of our other athletes, and the officials and coaches, a lesson in strategy and tactics.’

If confidence could be drawn from the number of column inches guaranteeing his victory, Bannister was a sure thing. Most sportswriters considered him their favourite. But his legs hurt. He hadn’t slept soundly in days. He was plagued by worries, both real and otherwise. His qualifying round and semi-final in the previous two days had been brutal. To avoid the jostling and elbowing of a crowded field he’d run both races in the second and third lanes, adding at least twenty yards to each and exhausting himself even more. The semi-final had been especially taxing because there was a fight to the finish that placed him a narrow four-tenths of a second ahead of Jungwirth from Czechoslovakia, who had failed to qualify. Usually Bannister required three or four days of recovery after such a race because of his limited training regime, but now he had been given only twenty-four hours.

In his room, waiting as the minutes ticked past, Bannister knew the 1,500m final would draw the world’s attention. He knew the stands would be jammed to capacity. He knew his competitors had also trained for thousands of hours for this day, and that they would strive with every muscle and ounce of will to claim victory. It was impossible not to rehearse the coming race over and over again in his head. How quickly should he start? Should he stay on the inside lane or move to the outside? Where must he be by the third lap? How close to the finish could he start his burst?

When Bannister made his way down the tunnel underneath the stadium that afternoon, he was no less tortured. His face was blanched, his step uncertain. Australian miler Don Macmillan walked alongside him. He was in bad shape as well, dehydrated and soaked with perspiration after the voodoo warm-up imposed by his coach, yet he noticed that Bannister, against whom he had run in New Zealand in 1950, was pale and nervous.

‘Good luck, Don,’ Bannister said, heading up into the stadium.

‘Thanks, Roger,’ Macmillan choked out.

The time had come. When the Duke of Edinburgh arrived in the stands, the crowd cheered. The sun even broke through the clouds to honour this signature Olympic race. While the other athletes stretched and jogged around the infield to warm up, Bannister rested on the bench. Chris Brasher, the British steeplechaser and former president of the Cambridge University Athletic Club, watched from the stands and later described his friend’s appearance: ‘There was a peculiar loneliness about Roger. He stood apart from the others, looking drawn and white, as if he were about to go into a torture chamber.’ Chris Chataway was also in the stands. He had written to his mother the day before to tell her how concerned he was about Bannister’s state in the days before his race. As Chataway waited for the race to begin, he worried that his room-mate had already defeated himself in his mind. However, though tense and sapped of energy from two heats, Bannister still felt that he had a chance. Every race was imperfect, and he had always come through in the past.

Once Finnish middle-distance runner Denis Johansson had completed a presumptuous pre-race victory lap, the starter called the race. With the eleven others, Bannister came to the line. The crowd hushed for the gun. He had prepared his whole athletics career for this moment. Suddenly, they were off.

The German Lamers carried the field through the first lap in 57.8 seconds, looking as though he might be pacing for his countryman and the favourite to win, Werner Lueg. Throughout this first lap, Bannister stayed to the inside; he did not have the energy to battle in the middle of the pack. Lamers soon faded, and Lueg took the lead, finishing the second lap at a slower pace in 2:01.4. By this time Bannister had managed to come up through the field and was running in fifth place. At the bell, Lueg was still leading. He finished the third lap in 3:03, still on the slow side given the field’s talent. Only three-quarters of a lap to go.

In the radio broadcast booth, BBC announcer Harold Abrahams was worried for Bannister, despite the fact that he was in the right position – third – for making his break. ‘He is not running as well as one would hope,’ Abrahams said. ‘He is looking rather tired.’

In the back straight of the last lap, the race heated up. Two hundred metres from the finish and the whole field was nearly sprinting. Down the straight, Aberg of Sweden and then El Mabrouk of France tried to surge to the head of the pack. Bannister was next, deciding to strike at the same time Lovelock had in the 1936 Olympics final to win the gold.

‘Bannister is in third position with 180 metres to go. Bannister fighting magnificently. Bannister now trying to get into the lead.’

This was it, Bannister thought. Although he had suffered nothing but dread since learning of the added semi-final, he was now in the ideal spot to win the gold. He had managed the jostling field, kept with the pace, and avoiding tripping. As he moved into the final turn, now in second place, he called on the full effect of his finishing kick – his most potent weapon. He gave the order to his legs to go, but for the first time in his life his kick wasn’t there. When he should have leapt ahead, he stalled. His legs just didn’t have the energy. It was a shock. Little Josey Barthel from Luxembourg swept by him, unbelievably, impossibly. Then the American, McMillen, passed him as well. Bannister felt drained and helpless, knowing he had lost.

‘Bannister is fading!’ Abrahams called into the microphone.

Lueg held strong, stretching his lead by three yards at the end of the turn. Barthel then struck, delivering the finish Bannister wanted for his own. The Luxemburger cruised past Lueg in the final fifty metres with McMillen also coming up fast.

‘And it’s Barthel wins. Second, the American. Third, Lueg. Fourth, Bannister. Time, 3:45.2.’

It was a new Olympic record, and the surprise upset of the Games. Bannister was so exhausted by the end of the race that he had to hold on to the back of Lueg’s singlet to keep from pitching to the track. He hadn’t even claimed a bronze. The British team was distraught. Columnists began to sharpen their pencils. This was a betrayal of trust.

Barthel was handed roses, and then he rested on a bench to take off his shoes. The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling observed, ‘He had had no trainer and no compatriot with him when he came into the stadium, and he was still alone. It must have been a great solace to him on the night before the race, knowing he had nobody to disappoint.’ How different it was for Bannister who, full of emotion, later watched Barthel mount the victory dais and weep tears of joy while Luxembourg’s anthem played throughout the stadium. For Bannister, the Helsinki final was a disaster. He told his friend Brasher years later, ‘A disaster is something which is shared between you and the public which expects something of you and which you cannot or have not fulfilled.’

As he headed back to the Olympic Village later that afternoon, fending off the press who were preparing to excoriate him for his insufficient preparations, Bannister needed to find a way to overcome what had happened. He couldn’t go out a loser. His answer would be to attempt a challenge that had been in the making for a very long time: the four-minute mile. And he would not be alone in the effort.

5

The man who has made the mile record is W. G. George … His time was 4 minutes 12.75 seconds, and the probability is that this record will never be beaten.

Harry Andrews, 1903

To the furthest limit he searches out.

Job 28:3

Before stopwatches, cinder tracks, and perfect records, man ran for the purest of reasons: to survive. The saying goes that ‘Every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or an antelope – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.’ There are few instincts more natural than the body in full motion as it races across a field or through the trees. From the beginning, we were all made to run. In days past, when ‘survival of the fittest’ meant exactly that, the only measure of the race was whether the hunted reached safety before being overtaken. Seconds and tenths of seconds had no meaning.

Sport evolved from this competition to survive. In ancient Egypt, newly chosen kings went on a ceremonial run, as historian Edward Sears wrote, that ‘symbolized laying claim to his domain and proved that he was fit enough for the demands of his position’. Thirty years after the king’s coronation, and every three years thereafter, he was challenged to run the same long distance he had as a young man. If he failed, he lost his power to rule. Other early societies proved status through skills such as hitting targets with a bow and arrow, lifting heavy rocks, or jumping across streams; but the ability to run faster and further than others remained a dominant standard.

It was fitting that the first event in civilisation’s earliest and greatest celebration of sport, the Olympic Games in 776 BC, was a foot race. A Greek citizen named Coroebus sprinted 200 yards across a meadow alongside the river Alpheus and was crowned winner with a garland made from the leaves and twigs of an olive tree. Sporting ability was integral to Greek life, and its people were the first to promote what would later be phrased mens sana in corpore sano – the sound mind in a sound body. Ancient Olympic champions were treated like gods, worthy of worship and great odes. The athletes ran their races naked and barefoot, and as the years passed they instituted ten-month training regimes and began to specialise in certain distances. Longer races involved running from one end of the stadium to the other and back, the distances varying from stadium to stadium. Success was recorded by how many victories an athlete had claimed over his fellows, not by their times (crudely measured, in those days, by sundial or water clock).

The Romans favoured gladiator contests over athletics, but they made two important contributions to the story of the four-minute mile: first, they were devoted to statistics and detailed the results of their sporting heroes (namely chariot racers); second, they were the first to come up with the distance of the mile. Roman soldiers calculated their long marches in mille passus (mille, one thousand; passus, a two-step stride). Given that each stride was roughly two feet and five inches – shorter than average because the soldiers carried over fifty pounds of provisions and weapons – the earliest mile translated to roughly 1,611 yards.

In sixteenth-century England, footmen, who travelled long distances by the sides of heavy coaches, steering their masters away from dangerous spots in the road, were the first to race, often at the bidding of their masters. They used the mile-posts, first installed by the ruling Romans, as starting and finishing lines. This tradition developed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into village festival ‘freak runs’, where the competitors ran on stilts or while carrying a load of fish. Endurance contests, whether walking or running, were also popular.

By the nineteenth century, ‘pedestrians’, as the English runners were known, were running on the roads for cash. Events were often organised by local pubs in order to draw a crowd. Since the mile race was a favourite, it paid to specialise in that distance. The idea of competing for a mile record instead of simply against one’s opponent in a particular race evolved gradually from the standardisation of the mile at 1,760 yards, advances in timekeeping, and an early industrial society’s passion for quantifying everything in sight. It so happened that a grass track divided into quarter-miles fitted nicely on to a cricket ground or football field, and it was much safer racing there than on increasingly busy roads. Technology, progress, and coincidence had played its part. Now all the mile race needed was a few fast souls.

Running a mile in less than five minutes was considered the breaking point until Scottish landowner Captain Robert Barclay came along. Famous for his cheerful disposition, predilection for lifting heavy objects, and for walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, Barclay won 500 guineas by posting a 4:50 mile in 1804. Then, in 1825, James Metcalf, ‘a tailor by trade, but a pedestrian by profession’ who trained by chasing hounds, beat Barclay’s time by a margin of twenty seconds. Over the next sixty years, various milers chipped away at the record, second by painful second, the best runners earning championship belts for their efforts. Over time, the stakes wagered rose into the thousands of pounds.

For most of the nineteenth century, the ‘gentleman amateur’ was absent from this scene. This British public school ideal, favoured by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, was indeed a noble thought, but the runners guided by subscribing to its strict rules were no match for the best of the professionals. That was until chemistry apprentice Walter George began training seriously and reduced his mile time to 4:18.8 in 1884. As this was just two seconds shy of the record held for the previous eight years by the professional William Cummings, a showdown between the two was inevitable.