The race to a flawless finish

So there I am, lying in a London hospital bed in 1960 after hurting my head in a car accident. In strides a doctor in white coat and stethoscope. It’s Roger Bannister! My idol, the man who first broke the “impossible” four-minute-mile barrier, an inspiration to weekend runners like me the world over, just as Lance Armstrong is to amateur bike riders today.

My jaw drops, eyes glaze, heart thumps. It is six years after his glory moment, but Bannister’s lantern jaw and “chest like an engine block” make him instantly recognizable, even in a doctor’s uniform. He briefly studies my chart, turns to the nurse matron and says crisply, “Discharge this patient -- it’s psychosomatic. Obviously the man’s neurotic.”

Reading “The Perfect Mile” -- Neal Bascomb’s stylish and absorbing account of how the Brit broke the record ahead of his two closest rivals, Australian “running machine” John Landy and “Kansas Meteor” Wes Santee -- helps to explain why my doctor’s bedside manner left something to be desired. Bannister’s superhuman commitment, scientific detachment and cool impersonality about his own body (and perhaps other people’s) gave him the winning edge on an Oxford University track 50 years ago. In the postwar 1940s and ‘50s, especially in the English-speaking world, there was a cultural excitement about lone individuals going beyond their limits, scaling unimaginable heights. Chuck Yeager pierced the sound barrier, Sir Edmund Hillary and sherpa Tenzing Norgay conquered Mt. Everest, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus. In athletics, tens of thousands of spectators routinely turned out for foot races like California’s Compton Invitational and Iowa’s Drake University Relays, holding their breath to see who would be the first to run a mile in less than four minutes, a threshold most experts insisted was beyond human reach.

In those prehistoric days, when running shoes were crude slabs of leather and all-weather tracks unknown, sports columnists covered middle-distance races like world title heavyweight fights. Something about the mile -- ancient Rome’s equivalent of 1,000 paces -- grabbed the popular imagination to make it the glamour event. The three front-runners in the quest to break the barrier were Landy, a part-time butterfly collector; Santee, the volatile, emotionally scarred farm boy; and Bannister, the emotionally distant medical student. In those days, you ran for love, glory and a tin-plated trophy.

It wasn’t always so. The first mile-racers were 16th century servants who trotted alongside their masters’ coaches and were urged to compete like racehorses. By the 19th century, Bascomb writes, “ ‘pedestrians,’ as the English runners were known, were running on the roads for cash” for themselves or for promoters. Some milers had their spleens surgically removed because they thought it improved their time. The image of a clean-living, modest, unpaid gentleman amateur was a late-Victorian invention, and whether by design or accident, it was a perfect formula for exploiting all but the richest athletes.

Bannister ran his perfect mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds on a blustery May 6, 1954, on a rough cinder track at Iffley, Oxford. A mere 46 days later, John Landy beat his record by 1.4 seconds -- a fantastic achievement at the time. But Bannister lingered in the mind as the first, hence the best. Today a four-minute mile is seen as quaintly outdated, since so many others have done it. In 1999, the Moroccan flash Hichem El Guerrouj ran the fastest mile in the world at 3:43.13. Shoe company endorsements, Strangelovian medicine and ever more hysterical fans probably will help bring the mile down to 3 1/2 minutes, perhaps at this summer’s Olympics in Athens, though probably not by an American. It has been 32 years since an American man has won an Olympic gold medal in a middle distance. What do world records matter to nonrunners? A tenth of a second here or there won’t bring world peace or global cooling. Yet those microseconds seem more important than life or death to athletes -- and to connoisseurs of the “impossible” like me who yearn for the lost innocence of running for the love of it.

The amateur athletics of Bannister’s day seem like a dream, another world. The only drug mentioned in Bascomb’s book is the liniment Santee rubbed on his heel before a race to prevent chafing. In 1956, when 20,000 people watched a new crop of milers compete in the Australian Championships in Melbourne, Landy stopped mid-lap to help fallen runner Ron Clarke, lost seven precious seconds yet somehow recovered his stride and won in 4 minutes 4.2 seconds. Today, with multimillion-dollar endorsements and cash for medal winners on the line, it seems naive to expect such sportsmanlike behavior. Although Bascomb spends a lot of pages on training methods -- Bannister prepared for seven grinding years -- his book is most interesting as a character study. The darkest, most intriguing figure is the “unstable, flighty and cocky” Santee.

As a farm boy, Santee “was his father’s property,” suffering through beatings and violent rages. “Some sons of abusive fathers want to become big enough to fight back,” Bascomb writes. “Santee wanted to become fast enough to get away.” His ticket out was an athletic scholarship to the University of Kansas. But the university and later the publicity-greedy Marine Corps overworked him in so many races that he had trouble staying in shape to fulfill his life’s dream. The Amateur Athletic Union even forbade Santee the use of pacesetters. Though Bannister had had two such fellow runners to set a fast pace for his record run, the U.S. group declared pacesetters cheating. AAU bureaucrats ultimately banned Santee for life from amateur competition, ostensibly for taking more than the $15-a-day limit for expenses, but Bascomb says it was really because he was a rebel who challenged their authority.

A showdown was inevitable between Landy and Bannister, who was hectored by fickle fans and venomous sportswriters as “Roger the Dodger” because to conserve his energy he often avoided racing against humans, preferring the clock. At the British Empire Games in Vancouver, in August 1954, Bannister resoundingly beat Landy head to head in the so-called race of the century, 3:58.8 to 3:59.6. From then on there were no doubts, no asterisks after his record.

Nobody knows for sure why records fall. Bascomb implies that the psychological factor is decisive.

Personally, whether in running or discovering the double helix, I think it comes down to killer instinct. Bannister, the panic-prone, middle-class wartime Blitz child who was anxious to prove his credentials as a gentleman at snobby Oxford, may have been carrying for one last glorious moment his declining empire’s battle flag, but he also was possessed with -- or perhaps by -- a vicious final-lap kick refined down to the merest fraction of a second. Being all that you can be and dreaming the impossible dream are all well and good, but it helps to have a killer kick. *