Sir Roger Bannister, First Athlete to Break 4-Minute Mile, Dies at 88<br />As the year went on, he would face far stiffer competition,<br />but with Brasher (later an Olympic steeplechase champion) and Chataway (later the world record holder at 5,000 meters) enlisted as his supporting cast, he chose May 6 and the familiar Iffley Road track, where he’d run as an Oxford man himself, as the time and place for his assault on the four-minute mark.<br />Sports Illustrated called him “among the most private of public men, inexhaustibly polite, cheerfully distant, open and complex.”<br />His 1955 memoir — called “The Four-Minute Mile,” and reissued 50 years later as “The<br />First Four Minutes” — amounted to a portrait of the athlete as a young artist.<br />“He was running on 28 training miles a week,” Sebastian Coe, who set the world record in the mile three different times, once said.<br />When he returned to London, however, his school there prized sports like rowing<br />and rugby above running, and his racing career stalled until he entered Oxford University, where, at 17, he was introduced to spiked shoes and ran his first mile in 4:53.<br />Landy said afterward, “When I looked ’round in the final back straight and he was still with me, I knew it was curtains.”<br />Bannister later said that Vancouver had been a more satisfying race than the celebrated one at Iffley Road<br />because it was a victory achieved against a great competitor and not merely against a clock.<br />Paced by Chataway and Brasher and powered by an explosive kick, his signature, Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes — 3:59.4, to<br />be exact — becoming the first man ever to do so, breaking through a mystical barrier and creating a seminal moment in sports history.
