23 March: Sir Roger Bannister

Sir Roger Bannister, the athlete who was first to run a mile in less than four minutes, was born on this date in 1929. 10 facts about him:

1. Bannister was born in Harrow on the outskirts of London. His father Ralph was a civil servant originally from Lancashire. The family moved to Bath at the start of the second world war. It was in school in Bath that Roger discovered he had a talent for cross country running.
2. He went to Oxford University on an athletic scholarship, where he started his career as a pacemaker for other athletes, and caught the eye of the coaches, who noted him as a potential Olympic athlete. He competed at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki and came fourth in the 1500 meters, missing out on a medal. Disappointed in his performance, he resolved that he would run a mile in less than four minutes.
3. Training often too second place to his academic studies – he was studying medicine. In 1947, for example, he was working on three weekly half-hour training sessions, yet still showed promise. He didn't compete in the 1948 Olympics because he wanted to concentrate on studying. However, when he resolved to run the four minute mile, he used his knowledge of medicine and the human body to come up with a training regime specially designed to prepare him for the feat.
4. He almost didn't run on the fateful day at all. His historic feat was almost stymied by the weather. Winds of up to twenty-five miles per hour (40 km/h) made Bannister think twice about running that day, saving his energy for a race on a less windy day. However, the winds dropped just before his race and he decided he would run after all.
5. The exact time of Bannister's famous mile was 3:59.4. The announcer at the event was Norris McWhirter, who would later become a co-publisher of the Guinness Book of Records, teased the crowd by delaying his announcement of Bannister's race time for as long as possible, but when he announced "The time was three..." their cheers drowned out the rest of the announcement.
6. While Roger Bannister is probably the most famous record holder for running a mile, he also holds the record for holding that record for the shortest amount of time. Just 46 days later, Australian runner John Landy shaved 1.5 seconds off the record in Turku, Finland. In 1954, the two raced against each other in Vancouver. Landy led for most of the race, but Bannister overtook him at the final turn, just as Landy looked over his shoulder to check where Bannister was. Both of them finished the mile race in under four minutes, the first time two men had done so in the same race. Vancouver sculptor Jack Harman made a bronze statue of the two runners, immortalising the moment when Landy looked over his shoulder. Landy quipped that while Lot's wife was turned to Salt for looking back, he was turned to bronze.
7. Once thought to be humanly impossible, running a mile in less than four minutes has since been achieved by more than 500 men, and at time of writing the record stands at 3:43.13, set by Moroccan runner Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999. As yet, no woman has achieved it. The women's record at time of writing is 4:12.56 set by Russian athlete Svetlana Masterkova in 1996.
8. A full time career in athletics was never on the cards for Bannister. He retired from the sport when he graduated and became a doctor. He became a neurologist, serving for many years as the director of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London. He once said in an interview, "I'd rather be remembered for my work in neurology than my running. If you offered me the chance to make a great breakthrough in the study of the autonomic nerve system, I'd take that over the four minute mile right away. I worked in medicine for sixty years. I ran for about eight."
9. That said, he never quite lost his interest in athletics and served as chairman of the British Sports Council and president of the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Recreation. He was actually the first Chairman of the Sports Council (now Sport England) and it was for this that he received his knighthood in 1975, not for running the four minute mile. It was in this post, too, that he foresaw that drugs in sport was likely to become a problem and gathered a team of scientists to devise the first test for anabolic steroids.
10. Bannister married the Swedish artist Moyra Elver Jacobsson in Basel, Switzerland in 1955. They had four children. In 2011, Bannister was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He died in March 2018 at the age of 88.

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