Roger Bannister, a gentleman who almost didn’t run race that defined him

Even now, 64 years on, 3:59.4 is a number recognisable to every sports fan – and one that instantly unlocks sepia images in the mind’s eye. Of Sir Roger Bannister hurling his body across the line in a desperate bid to make history. Of an expectant crowd around him. And then the deafening roar – and the sweetest release – as the crowd hears he has become the first person to run the mile in under four minutes.

Sir Roger was later to become a prominent neurologist but by then he already knew the power of the mind. As he admitted, he imagined bombs and machine guns would rain down on him if he did not go at absolute full pelt.

Yet Bannister’s record for the ages, achieved on 6 May 1954, nearly never took place. For after working in a hospital that morning, he almost decided not to travel to the Iffley Road track in Oxford because of high winds.

However a chance meeting with his coach, Franz Stampfl, convinced him otherwise. Stampfl told him: “If you pass it up today you may never forgive yourself for the rest of your life.”

Yet it was only 30 minutes before the race was due to start at 6pm that Bannister decided he would compete. “My pacemakers Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway were getting a little impatient,” he told me in 2014.

“They were saying: ‘Make up your mind!’ But it was I who had to do it. I was very concerned about the weather but when the wind dropped it proved just possible.”

Bannister’s performance was more remarkable still given his lack of training. He would skip his gynaecology lectures, enabling him to run for 45 minutes at lunchtime, and did only 35 miles a week.

Source: theguardian