The Miracle Sub-4 mile - 50 Years Ago
Everything was almost as it was exactly 50 years ago when the runners in the men's mile were called to their marks shortly after 6pm at Iffley Road last night. Even the flag on the spire of St George's Church that overlooks the track was the same as then.

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By Duncan Mackay
Posted Tuesday, 11 May, 2004

In the stands the years rolled back for Sir Roger Bannister, above, to 1954 when he had run 3min 59.4sec, the most famous figures in a sport where statistics are bread and butter.

Craig Mottram, winner of the celebratory race, would have left Bannister 30 metres behind with his time of 3:56.64, but racing against the clock, a metaphor for mortality, has conferred on Bannister a certain sort of immortality.

At 75 he is an old man who admits he would struggle to do a lap of the track in four minutes now but whose youth is celebrated around this time every year, though never quite as spectacularly as in these past few weeks.

Bannister has never embraced fame and is justifiably proud of being one of the world's leading neurosurgeons, author and a former master of Pembroke College. But it was his athletics achievements that drew an impressive collection of former world record holders and Olympic and world champions here.

They included John Landy, who travelled from Australia and who had broken Bannister's record 46 days after it was set, although that was little consolation after earlier coming so close to being the historymaker himself. There may have been a certain sense of revenge in seeing Mottram, an Australian, winning.

Television crews from around the world had made a pilgrimage to Oxford.

Until Bannister's performance, running sub-four minutes for a mile was thought impossible. Since then 962 other athletes have beaten four minutes.

The American Steve Scott achieved the feat 141 times and in 1997 Kenya's Daniel Komen ran back-to-back sub-four-minute miles in running 7:58.61 for two.

"It's really the business of the magic numbers, isn't it?" said Bannister. "Four even laps of one minute each make a four-minute mile, the classic Anglo-Saxon distance."

Bannister presented Mottram with a medal before striding away purposefully to join his closest friends for a celebratory dinner - forever master of the mile.

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/athletics/story/0,10082,1211533,00.html

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