![]() “I felt angry, that precious moments during the lull in the wind might be slipping by,” he wrote in his book, “The Four Minute Mile.”Īfter the restart, though, the six-runner race unfolded as planned. The plan was for Brasher to set the pace for the first 2½ laps over the quarter-mile track, ideally running the half-mile in less than two minutes, then for Chataway to take the lead on the third lap and hit the three-quarter mark at about three minutes, then for Bannister to move into the lead with three-quarters of a lap to go and count on his strong finishing kick.Ī false start, which almost never happens in distance races, irked Bannister. ![]() “When I noticed that the wind had settled the flag, I talked to myself and realized that I must do it.” “It’s amazing that one can be indecisive up to the point of decision,” Bannister told The Times in 1994. A shower ended just about that time and the wind slackened, Bannister noticing that a flag on a nearby church steeple was hanging limp. “He made the point that, ‘If you don’t take this opportunity, you may never forgive yourself,’” Bannister recalled in a 1999 Sports Illustrated story.Īt that, though, Bannister chose to postpone his decision until 5 p.m., an hour before the start of the race. Stampfl encouraged the young runner to go for it. Stampfl happened to be on the same train and he and Bannister discussed the possibility of a 4-minute mile in such conditions. He completed his hospital duties, then caught a midday train for the short ride to Oxford. It was raining that day when Bannister arrived at the hospital for morning rounds, and the wind was blowing at 20 mph. The race selected for the attempt was nothing special - the mile event in a dual track meet between Oxford University, where Bannister had spent his undergraduate years, and the British Amateur Athletic Assn., for which he then was running. They met weekends to train and work out a race strategy, sometimes under the guidance of Franz Stampfl, a freelance coach from Austria. He also figured he would need help in setting a proper pace and enlisted two of his Olympian friends, Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher, to help him. His med school studies and hospital duties in London left him with limited training time - usually half an hour at lunchtime - but he figured he could increase his lung capacity with intense sprint workouts, then run the crucial race in 440-yard increments of a minute each, rather than as a single long event. So Bannister, in his methodical, scientific way, plotted a course to sports history. The record was 4:01.4 set by Sweden’s Gunder Haegg in 1945 but Landy, Santee and Bannister all had been running about 4:02.
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