![]() He won his first significant race, the mile against Cambridge in March 1947. That determination returned when he entered Oxford University in 1946 at the young age of 17. “I always finished in the last stages of exhaustion, but I refused to let anyone beat me,” he wrote later. He found his greatest pleasure in long cycling rides, but discovered ability as a runner when he won sprints at elementary school and his high school junior cross country when only 12 or 13. He was a nervous boy, prone to headaches and anxious about wartime bombings-the family house was badly damaged on one occasion. Mary’s Hospital to complete his medical qualifications. With no family money, Bannister’s education was entirely public-funded at a local elementary school in Harrow, a high school in Bath when his father’s office was moved there on the outbreak of World War II, as a scholar at a London private school, University College School, and on scholarships at Oxford University and St. They instilled in their son a fervent belief in self-improvement and disciplined study. His parents had moved from the Lancashire cotton mill area, when his father qualified as a civil service clerk and his mother as a home economics teacher. Contrary to some misinformed versions, he did not come from privilege. Roger Gilbert Bannister was born in 1929, with one older sister, in the London suburb of Harrow, Middlesex. He immediately retired from racing to focus on medicine at only 25 years old, less than four months after the run that made him a legend. And Bannister ended the season by dominating the talented European 1500 meters in a championship record 3:43.8. Bannister-outkicking the front-running Landy in 3:58.8. After the four-minute mile, he won the Empire (now Commonwealth) Games one mile in Vancouver in an epic race against John Landy (Australia)-who on June 21 had supplanted him as world record holder by becoming the second sub-four miler with 3:57.9. ![]() Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪs a middle-distance athlete, at a time when competitive opportunities were limited but crowds were large, Bannister was for four years world-class, and in his final year in 1954, unbeatably brilliant. He also held influential posts at various times as Chairman of Britain’s Sports Council, President of the International Council for Sport and Recreation, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Director of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, London. Bannister’s barrier-breaking race seemed at the time to symbolize the world’s emergence from two destructive wars into a new dawn of heroic aspiration, and now stands historically (however irrationally) with the Wright Brothers, the conquest of Everest, and the first man on the moon.īannister spent the rest of his life politely denying that his sub-four was so significant, and assiduously created a career that he valued more highly, in medicine and neurological research. The iconic finish-line photo is one of only three sports pictures among the hundred in the millennial book, 100 Photographs that Changed the World. He was 88, and had been slowed by Parkinson’s disease since 2011.īannister’s 3:59.4 mile, on four laps of the cinder track at Oxford University on May 6, 1954, has become a symbol of human achievement far beyond the annals of sport. ![]() Roger Bannister, the British runner who acquired legendary status for being the first person to run a mile faster than four minutes in 1954, died on March 3 in Oxford, England.
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