If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
Rudyard Kipling, ‘If …’
‘How did he know he would not die?’ a Frenchman asked of the first runner to break the four-minute mile. Half a century ago the ambition to achieve that goal equalled scaling Everest or sailing alone around the world. Most people considered running four laps of the track in four minutes to be beyond the limits of human speed. It was foolhardy and possibly dangerous to attempt. Some thought that rather than a lifetime of glory, honour, and fortune, a hearse would be waiting for the first man to accomplish the feat.
The four-minute mile: this was the barrier, both physical and psychological, that begged to be broken. The number had a certain mathematical elegance. As one writer explained, the figure ‘seemed so perfectly round – four laps, four quarter miles, four-point-oh-oh minutes – that it seemed God himself had established it as man’s limit’. Under four minutes: the place had the mysterious and heroic resonance of reaching sport’s Valhalla. For decades the world’s best middle-distance runners tried and failed. They came to within a second or so, but that was as close as they were able to get. Attempt after spirited attempt proved futile. Each effort was like a stone added to a wall that looked increasingly impossible to breach.
The four-minute mile had a fascination beyond its mathematical roundness and assumed impossibility. Running the mile was an art form in itself. The distance, unlike the 100-yard sprint or marathon, required a balance of speed and stamina. The person to break that barrier would have to be fast, diligently trained, and supremely aware of his body, so that he would cross the finish line just at the point of complete exhaustion. Further, the four-minute mile had to be won alone. There could be no team-mates to blame, no coach during half-time to inspire a comeback. One might hide behind the excuses of cold weather, an unkind wind, a slow track, or jostling competition, but ultimately, these obstacles had to be defied. Winning a foot race, particularly one waged against the clock, was a battle with oneself, over oneself.
In August 1952 the battle commenced. Three young men in their early twenties set out to be the first to break the barrier. One of them was Wes Santee, the ‘Dizzy Dean of the Cinders’. Santee was a natural athlete, the son of a Kansas ranch hand, born to run fast. He amazed crowds with his running feats, basked in the publicity, and was the first to announce his intention of running the mile in four minutes. ‘He just flat believed he was better than anybody else,’ said one sportswriter. Few knew that running was his escape from a brutal childhood.
Then there was John Landy, the Australian who trained harder than anyone else and had the weight of a nation’s expectations on his shoulders. The mile for Landy was more aesthetic achievement than foot race. He said, ‘I’d rather lose a 3:58 mile than win one in 4:10.’ Landy ran night and day, across fields, through woods, up sand dunes, along the beach in knee-deep surf. Running revealed to him a self-discipline he never knew he possessed.
And finally there was Roger Bannister, the English medical student who epitomised the ideal of the amateur athlete in a world being overrun by professionals and the commercialisation of sport. For Bannister the four-minute mile was ‘a challenge of the human spirit’, but one to be realised with a calculated plan. It required scientific experiments, the wisdom of a man who knew great suffering, and a magnificent finishing kick.
All three runners endured thousands of hours of training to shape their bodies and minds. They ran more miles in a year than many of us walk in a lifetime. They spent a large part of their youths struggling for breath. They trained week after week to the point of collapse, all to shave off a second, maybe two, during a mile race – the time it takes to snap one’s fingers and register the sound. There were sleepless nights, training sessions in rain, sleet, snow, and scorching heat. There were times when they wanted to go out for a beer or a date yet knew they couldn’t. They understood that life was somehow different for them, that idle happiness would elude them. If they weren’t training or racing or gathering the will required for these, they were trying not to think about training and racing at all.
In 1953 and 1954, as Santee, Landy, and Bannister attacked the four-minute barrier, getting closer with every passing month, their stories were splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world, alongside headlines of the Korean War, the atomic arms race, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, and Edmund Hillary’s climb towards the world’s rooftop. Their performances outdrew golf majors, Ashes Tests, horse derbies, football and rugby matches, and baseball pennant races. Stanley Matthews, Ben Hogan, Rocky Marciano, Mike Hawthorn and Surrey County Cricket Club were often in the shadows of the three runners, whose achievements attracted media attention to athletics that has never been equalled. For weeks in advance of every race the headlines heralded an impending break in the barrier: ‘Landy Likely to Achieve Impossible!’; ‘Bannister Gets Chance of 4-Minute Mile!’; ‘Santee Admits Getting Closer to Phantom Mile’. Articles dissected track conditions and the latest weather forecasts. Millions around the world followed every attempt. Whenever any of the runners failed – and there were many failures – he was criticised for coming up short, for not having what it took. Each such episode only motivated the others to try harder.
They fought on, reluctant heroes whose ambition was fuelled by a desire to achieve the goal and to be the best. They had fame, undeniably, but of the three men only Santee enjoyed the publicity, and that proved to be more of a burden than an advantage. As for riches, financial reward was hardly a factor. They were all amateurs. They had to scrape around for pocket change, relying on their hosts at races for decent room and board. The prize for winning a meet was usually a watch or a small trophy. At that time, the dawn of television, when amateur sport was losing its innocence to the new spirit of win-at-any-cost, these three strove only for the sake of the attempt. The reward was in the effort.
After four soul-crushing laps around the track, one of the three finally breasted the tape in 3:59.4, but the race did not end there. The barrier was broken, and a media maelstrom descended on the victor, yet the ultimate question remained: who would be the best when they toed the starting line together?
The answer came in the perfect mile, a race no longer fought against the clock, rather against one another. It was won with a terrific burst around the final bend in front of an audience that spanned the globe.
If sport, as a chronicler of this battle once said, is a ‘tapestry of alternating triumph and tragedy’, then the first thread of this story begins with tragedy. It occurred in a race 120 yards short of a mile, at the Olympic 1,500m final in Helsinki, Finland, almost two years to the day before the greatest of triumphs.