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'Good evening and welcome to the Iffley Road Athletic Ground, Oxford, | 0:00:05 | 0:00:09 | |
'for the OUAC vs Amateur Athletic Association match...' | 0:00:09 | 0:00:13 | |
The four minutes itself, you know, there was this huge history. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:19 | |
The lure of the mile still exists. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:21 | |
If I'd had a choice about one world record to break, | 0:00:21 | 0:00:23 | |
it would've been the mile. | 0:00:23 | 0:00:24 | |
The mile has always been the blue ribboned event. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
It had a place in British hearts and always has done. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:30 | |
People could easily understand that, if you're running four minutes, you | 0:00:30 | 0:00:33 | |
were going to have to be running somewhere around 60 seconds a lap. | 0:00:33 | 0:00:36 | |
It's about the right amount of time for drama to unfold. | 0:00:36 | 0:00:40 | |
'First call for the one mile run. | 0:00:40 | 0:00:42 | |
'All athletes please check in with the clerk.' | 0:00:42 | 0:00:44 | |
The sub-four minute mile certainly always establishes you as a runner. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:50 | |
I remember as a kid running behind a car at 15mph, | 0:00:50 | 0:00:54 | |
so I could actually understand what it meant. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:56 | |
You need the luck, you need good weather, | 0:00:56 | 0:00:58 | |
just perfectly timed training. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
If I'd broken a four-minute mile, that would have meant as much to me, | 0:01:01 | 0:01:04 | |
almost, as breaking the world record did in the 10,000 metres. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:08 | |
'This is the second call for the one mile run. | 0:01:08 | 0:01:11 | |
'Please could all athletes check in with the clerk.' | 0:01:11 | 0:01:14 | |
I grew up just before people were breaking four minutes for a mile. | 0:01:14 | 0:01:18 | |
You could not have been brought up in my generation of track and field | 0:01:18 | 0:01:21 | |
without having Roger as a massive influence. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
Bannister was probably my first really big hero. | 0:01:24 | 0:01:29 | |
You knew there was a heritage to particularly the mile, | 0:01:29 | 0:01:31 | |
if nothing else that, you wanted to belong to. | 0:01:31 | 0:01:35 | |
It is the tradition, for me. | 0:01:35 | 0:01:36 | |
It is the fact that it was Bannister. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:39 | |
'This is the final call for the one mile. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:41 | |
'Can athletes please make their way to the start?' | 0:01:41 | 0:01:44 | |
Even beyond track and field athletes, it's a benchmark that | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
people still understand as something that is absolutely momentous. | 0:01:47 | 0:01:50 | |
'In lane one, representing Oxford University Athletic Club, Yale and | 0:01:50 | 0:01:55 | |
'University College, GF Dole.' | 0:01:55 | 0:01:58 | |
This one span of about a year, | 0:01:58 | 0:02:01 | |
we had Everest climbed and the Queen crowned. | 0:02:01 | 0:02:06 | |
'Representing the Amateur Athletic Association, CG Chataway.' | 0:02:06 | 0:02:10 | |
They were looking for another huge achievement | 0:02:10 | 0:02:13 | |
and so the four-minute mile | 0:02:13 | 0:02:15 | |
was rapidly compared to Everest. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:18 | |
'In lane two, representing the | 0:02:18 | 0:02:20 | |
'Amateur Athletic Association, CW Brasher.' | 0:02:20 | 0:02:24 | |
I've never experienced an event of that tremendous excitement. | 0:02:24 | 0:02:29 | |
He came off a wartime diet, | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
he did it on a track that was | 0:02:31 | 0:02:34 | |
costing him probably about a second and a half a lap. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:38 | |
'In lane three, representing Oxford | 0:02:38 | 0:02:40 | |
'University Athletic Club and Magdalen College, AD Gordon.' | 0:02:40 | 0:02:44 | |
It was a magical barrier. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:46 | |
As many people have commented, it is | 0:02:46 | 0:02:48 | |
sort of the Everest of track and field. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:50 | |
There was this question of, can we even go there? | 0:02:50 | 0:02:53 | |
Most of the commentators told him he couldn't possibly do it. | 0:02:53 | 0:02:57 | |
There's probably nothing more challenging than somebody telling you you can't do it. | 0:02:57 | 0:03:01 | |
I don't think it was just about track and field. It was about exploration. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:04 | |
Anybody trying to run under four minutes for the mile might actually | 0:03:04 | 0:03:08 | |
endanger their lives. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:10 | |
The four minutes mile was an achievement on behalf of humanity. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:12 | |
'In lane four, representing the Amateur Athletic Association, RG Bannister.' | 0:03:13 | 0:03:19 | |
Roger Bannister is the best example of doing something when your brain says no. | 0:03:20 | 0:03:25 | |
'Runners, to your marks.' | 0:03:25 | 0:03:27 | |
But your heart says, yes, you can. | 0:03:27 | 0:03:29 | |
'This country is at war with Germany.' | 0:04:02 | 0:04:05 | |
I can remember I was sailing my boat | 0:04:07 | 0:04:09 | |
at the local recreation ground pond, | 0:04:09 | 0:04:12 | |
when I heard the first air raid siren | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
and I remember having had a slightly guilty thought - "Life is very dull. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:22 | |
"What would happen if there were a war?" | 0:04:22 | 0:04:24 | |
'More searchlights come into action. | 0:04:24 | 0:04:26 | |
'You see them reach straight up into the sky and occasionally they catch | 0:04:26 | 0:04:29 | |
'the cloud and seem to splash on the bottom of it. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:31 | |
'Just a few people here walking rather hurriedly towards the air raid shelters...' | 0:04:31 | 0:04:35 | |
When I heard this air raid siren, I didn't know whether bombs would | 0:04:35 | 0:04:40 | |
start dropping immediately, so I tucked my sailing boat under my arm, | 0:04:40 | 0:04:46 | |
sprinted back home as soon as I could. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:49 | |
-WINSTON CHURCHILL: -The Battle of Britain is about to begin. | 0:04:51 | 0:04:54 | |
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:59 | |
So bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its | 0:04:59 | 0:05:03 | |
Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, | 0:05:03 | 0:05:09 | |
"This was their finest hour." | 0:05:09 | 0:05:12 | |
My father was in the Admiralty and so this whole section of government | 0:05:14 | 0:05:22 | |
was moved to Bath, away from the city of London, | 0:05:22 | 0:05:26 | |
because the Blitz was catching any buildings and public places. | 0:05:26 | 0:05:31 | |
-NEWSREADER: -I'm standing on top of a very tall building. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:35 | |
The whole of the skyline to the south is lit up with a ruddy glow. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:41 | |
Almost like a sunrise or a sunset. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:45 | |
For two nights, the city of Bath was very, very badly damaged | 0:05:48 | 0:05:53 | |
and the house we lived in, the atrium above the stairway fell in | 0:05:53 | 0:06:00 | |
and the blast blew out all the windows. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
-NEWSREADER: -German aircraft carried out a number of attacks | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
on Great Britain last night. | 0:06:06 | 0:06:07 | |
Enemy aircraft have been reported over towns on the south coast, | 0:06:07 | 0:06:10 | |
the west of England, as well as over the London area. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
I remember having a discussion with my parents as to whether we should | 0:06:15 | 0:06:19 | |
stay to have a potentially third night of this attack. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:25 | |
We eventually decided to take | 0:06:26 | 0:06:29 | |
food and blankets and walk to Limpley Stoke, | 0:06:29 | 0:06:34 | |
where there was a great forest. | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
And so we spent the night camping out. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:41 | |
I was directed to a comprehensive school called Beechen Cliff School. | 0:06:46 | 0:06:53 | |
I lived on one side of the city, which was called Landsdown, | 0:06:53 | 0:06:59 | |
and I had to get to a hill on the other side of town. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:03 | |
I had about 2-3 miles and so, with my satchel, I would walk or | 0:07:04 | 0:07:12 | |
half run down Landsdown Hill, | 0:07:12 | 0:07:17 | |
through the city with the Roman baths and the Assembly Rooms and | 0:07:17 | 0:07:22 | |
then, just before the school, there was a Beechen Cliff and a very, | 0:07:22 | 0:07:27 | |
very steep pathway with large steps and I used to run up this. | 0:07:27 | 0:07:34 | |
And so that was really my training. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:37 | |
I won the cross-country there when I was 11, 12, 13. | 0:07:38 | 0:07:44 | |
I expected to be given the cup. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
Someone had said, if you win a cup three times, then it's given to you. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:51 | |
This was a massive cup, absolutely beautiful cup. | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
And the staff heard that I'd expected to be given it as I had won it three times, a record time, | 0:07:54 | 0:08:01 | |
and they then gave me a replica, which was about so high. | 0:08:01 | 0:08:07 | |
That was my earliest trophy and therefore my most treasured trophy. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:13 | |
I did have a capacity to run and enjoyed running. | 0:08:13 | 0:08:20 | |
I think there's a part of me that was a loner. | 0:08:20 | 0:08:24 | |
I had a bicycle when I was about 13 and would ride | 0:08:25 | 0:08:32 | |
from Bath to London to visit my friends, | 0:08:32 | 0:08:37 | |
which is about 110 miles or something. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:42 | |
That was a sort of physical achievement which probably not many | 0:08:42 | 0:08:48 | |
people of my age would have done. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
Or perhaps indeed their parents wouldn't have allowed them to do it. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
'This is London calling. Here is a newsflash. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:03 | |
WINSTON CHURCHILL: 'Yesterday morning at 2:41, | 0:09:03 | 0:09:08 | |
'General Jodl signed the act of unconditional surrender | 0:09:08 | 0:09:13 | |
'to the Allied Expeditionary Force.' | 0:09:13 | 0:09:16 | |
CHURCH BELLS RING | 0:09:16 | 0:09:19 | |
At the end of the war, as a kind of celebration of the war being over, | 0:09:21 | 0:09:27 | |
there was an athletics meeting held at the White City Stadium. | 0:09:27 | 0:09:32 | |
And in the mile, there was Sydney Wooderson and Arne Andersson. | 0:09:32 | 0:09:37 | |
We only just got into the ground | 0:09:37 | 0:09:39 | |
because somebody pushed over a fence. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:42 | |
There was such a yearning to see sport again. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:46 | |
Just on the last bend, Sydney Wooderson came up to challenge | 0:09:48 | 0:09:53 | |
Arne Andersson. It just looked for a moment as whether Sidney Wooderson | 0:09:53 | 0:09:59 | |
might do it. But then Andersson strode away from him. | 0:09:59 | 0:10:04 | |
So there I was, I was seeing two world record holders | 0:10:04 | 0:10:07 | |
and I found that most inspiring. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:10 | |
Someone said, possibly Wellington, that the next worst thing... | 0:10:16 | 0:10:22 | |
..to losing a war was winning a war. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
If you think about the victory, the very long war, | 0:10:30 | 0:10:35 | |
a lot of war weariness, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:37 | |
the anticipation is presumably | 0:10:37 | 0:10:39 | |
that there will be some light at the end of the tunnel. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:42 | |
You've got to remember the incredible levels of privation | 0:10:44 | 0:10:48 | |
that the UK goes through with rationing in the war. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:51 | |
And then people are very, very hungry and very, very cold. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:55 | |
Right up to the early 1950s. | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
Bread rationing was introduced for the first time in 1946. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:02 | |
It hadn't been rationed during the war. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:04 | |
So that gives an indication, doesn't it, that the wartime shortages and | 0:11:04 | 0:11:08 | |
the sense that people must have had that, once the war was over, | 0:11:08 | 0:11:11 | |
things would go back to normal, and everything would get much better. | 0:11:11 | 0:11:15 | |
There's actually quite a big time lag before that starts to happen. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:18 | |
When I arrived at Oxford in the fall of '52, er... | 0:11:18 | 0:11:24 | |
eggs, butter, sugar were still rationed. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:27 | |
There were still shortages. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:29 | |
When I moved from the college after the first semester, | 0:11:29 | 0:11:33 | |
one of the first things my landlady asked me was, | 0:11:33 | 0:11:36 | |
"What day would you like your egg?" | 0:11:36 | 0:11:38 | |
One egg a week. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
I would describe it as having endured. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:43 | |
They'd done the right thing. They're pleased they've done the right thing. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
They've been vindicated in doing the right thing. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:49 | |
There begins to be a creeping awareness, I think, of loss of power and status. | 0:11:49 | 0:11:53 | |
All these things made the country | 0:11:53 | 0:11:57 | |
feel that the past glories of Empire were lost and gone for ever. | 0:11:57 | 0:12:04 | |
I wasn't really an athlete. | 0:12:14 | 0:12:17 | |
All I was concerned with was getting the exams for Oxford. | 0:12:17 | 0:12:21 | |
Oxford had changed a lot from before the war. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
It was much less luxurious in the way it treated undergraduates. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:29 | |
But it was still really very old-fashioned. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:32 | |
Throughout the war, students had managed to take | 0:12:33 | 0:12:37 | |
the entrance exam for Oxford and passed it. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:42 | |
But they were immediately then conscripted into the Army. | 0:12:42 | 0:12:46 | |
So there were whole cadres of students | 0:12:46 | 0:12:52 | |
who had gone through the war and came back aged 23, 24, | 0:12:52 | 0:13:00 | |
and there was one person who'd been an acting brigadier! | 0:13:00 | 0:13:05 | |
All of these ex-servicemen will have produced much more interesting | 0:13:05 | 0:13:09 | |
tutorials all round and a much more serious sense of purpose. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:13 | |
I was 17 at the time. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:16 | |
And the difference in experience that they'd had of the world, | 0:13:16 | 0:13:22 | |
loss of life, | 0:13:22 | 0:13:24 | |
was something which I just wasn't even capable of understanding. | 0:13:24 | 0:13:29 | |
You had these people who come back and they are... | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
They've achieved a huge amount... | 0:13:32 | 0:13:35 | |
and they've been pushed into positions of responsibility very, very early. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:39 | |
I felt that we had to do something to try to match. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:45 | |
Although we couldn't be in the war, something, perhaps sporting, | 0:13:45 | 0:13:50 | |
which would have a significance. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
Bannister may have felt that he needed to prove himself in a world | 0:13:53 | 0:13:57 | |
dominated by older, returning servicemen. | 0:13:57 | 0:13:59 | |
Perhaps it is the case that warfare leaves people | 0:13:59 | 0:14:03 | |
with the feeling that what they're doing after it isn't really very | 0:14:03 | 0:14:07 | |
significant, and pushes them further. | 0:14:07 | 0:14:11 | |
I think different people would have taken that in different ways. | 0:14:11 | 0:14:15 | |
Some people took it and it turned them into Marxist rebels. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:19 | |
Some people took it and it turned them into nothing more than chartered accountants. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:23 | |
When Sir Roger entered Oxford in 1946, he was sort of, | 0:14:28 | 0:14:32 | |
really, an average runner by all accounts. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:35 | |
I wanted to be a runner. | 0:14:35 | 0:14:38 | |
I remember running on this Exeter College grass with somebody who was | 0:14:38 | 0:14:43 | |
an oarsman and the groundsman said, | 0:14:43 | 0:14:46 | |
"I remember Jack Lovelock," who was at Exeter College. | 0:14:46 | 0:14:50 | |
"He had such a neat style. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
"I don't think you'll make a runner," he said to me! | 0:14:54 | 0:14:56 | |
My first race was in the freshman's sports in the December of 1946 | 0:14:58 | 0:15:06 | |
and I came second and I did a time of 4.52. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:11 | |
Roger, as a medical student, was a conscientious student. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:17 | |
Like most medical students, really had to do a pretty full day. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:21 | |
And the training that I did was usually on my own, | 0:15:21 | 0:15:26 | |
because I couldn't take the afternoons off. | 0:15:26 | 0:15:30 | |
I think Oxford is a place, whether you're talking about | 0:15:30 | 0:15:33 | |
the university or just the Rhodes Scholarship Programme | 0:15:33 | 0:15:37 | |
that is known for the ideal of sound body and sound mind. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:40 | |
I think Sir Roger really epitomises that. | 0:15:40 | 0:15:42 | |
I would run as hard as I could rather than, erm, | 0:15:42 | 0:15:47 | |
doing a great deal of longer work, which didn't seem to me to have | 0:15:47 | 0:15:53 | |
a relevance to releasing everything that I possessed. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:59 | |
In the Oxford and Cambridge Sports that year, | 0:16:00 | 0:16:03 | |
there was a great deal of snow and ice, | 0:16:03 | 0:16:06 | |
so they didn't hold proper trials, | 0:16:06 | 0:16:09 | |
but there were the two who'd run in the mile the previous year and they | 0:16:09 | 0:16:15 | |
said, "Well, we've seen this chap Bannister around and he's been | 0:16:15 | 0:16:19 | |
"awfully good at shovelling the ice and the snow, | 0:16:19 | 0:16:22 | |
"to try to get the third of a mile track clear. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:26 | |
"Let's put him in as third string." | 0:16:26 | 0:16:27 | |
I think it's pretty clear that Sir Roger had the innate biological or | 0:16:28 | 0:16:33 | |
genetic make up to do what he did. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:35 | |
So I said, "Well, what do I do as third string?" | 0:16:35 | 0:16:37 | |
They said, "Well, you keep at the back, and don't worry." | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
And beyond that, one thing that we know now is that really maybe the | 0:16:40 | 0:16:43 | |
more important kind of talent | 0:16:43 | 0:16:45 | |
in endurance running is how rapidly you respond to a training stimulus. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
I got to the last lap of the mile | 0:16:48 | 0:16:53 | |
at the White City Stadium. | 0:16:53 | 0:16:56 | |
And suddenly, I felt, well, I can accelerate. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:59 | |
And so, I accelerated round the rest of the field, | 0:16:59 | 0:17:03 | |
so that was really the start. | 0:17:03 | 0:17:05 | |
His progression was sort of stunning. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:08 | |
He went from being a decent freshman miler | 0:17:08 | 0:17:10 | |
to being a national calibre runner | 0:17:10 | 0:17:12 | |
and, in short order after that, to be an international calibre runner. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
I think that there's something in my family background. | 0:17:16 | 0:17:19 | |
My father had ambition and he had ability. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
But it wasn't really possible for him | 0:17:25 | 0:17:29 | |
to move into anything more important. | 0:17:29 | 0:17:34 | |
I think a single-mindedness was the consequence of feeling, | 0:17:34 | 0:17:39 | |
well, he hasn't been able to achieve this, but perhaps I might. | 0:17:39 | 0:17:45 | |
I decided not to run in the '48 Games, er... | 0:17:53 | 0:17:59 | |
in order to improve my chances to run in the '52 Games in Helsinki. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:07 | |
Before the 1952 Olympics, | 0:18:07 | 0:18:10 | |
I had paced Roger in a time trial over 1,200 metres. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:15 | |
I was predicted to be the favourite | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
by others as well as Harold Abrahams. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:22 | |
He did, I think, 2 minutes 52. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:27 | |
Which was far quicker than anybody had done it before. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:32 | |
The press got very, very uptight about our prospects in athletics. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:37 | |
I remember they named about five or six athletes, | 0:18:37 | 0:18:40 | |
all expected to win a gold medal. | 0:18:40 | 0:18:42 | |
And of course, Bannister was expected to win one. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
But for the last-minute insertion of | 0:18:45 | 0:18:47 | |
an extra round in the '52 Olympics, he would certainly have won. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:51 | |
STARTER'S PISTOL | 0:18:51 | 0:18:53 | |
They had three races on three successive days. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
I had not prepared for that. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
My fault, but there was nothing I could do about it. | 0:19:01 | 0:19:04 | |
I got to the shoulders of the field in the final. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:09 | |
I gave the instruction to my legs to run faster, | 0:19:10 | 0:19:15 | |
which had always hitherto worked, and there was just nothing there. | 0:19:15 | 0:19:20 | |
He was clearly disappointed to finish out of the medals. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:28 | |
I was so desperately upset when he didn't win. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:31 | |
Had he won the gold medal in Helsinki, he would have retired right on the spot. | 0:19:31 | 0:19:34 | |
It was a shattering experience. | 0:19:34 | 0:19:36 | |
The King had been ill for a while. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:49 | |
And he saw off Princess Elizabeth and the young Philip on a very | 0:19:49 | 0:19:54 | |
successful journey to many different parts of the Empire. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:59 | |
And the king gets iller and iller in London, so she is in Kenya, | 0:19:59 | 0:20:05 | |
when suddenly she is told of the death of her father. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:10 | |
She flies home and immediately assumes the burdens of state. | 0:20:11 | 0:20:17 | |
'In a welcome of bells, the Queen arrives at Westminster.' | 0:20:22 | 0:20:27 | |
The coronation was a great event. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:32 | |
What I did for the coronation was to take a sleeping bag and go sleep | 0:20:32 | 0:20:35 | |
on the pavement in London, and watch the procession go by. | 0:20:35 | 0:20:39 | |
The morning of the coronation, | 0:20:39 | 0:20:41 | |
the news of the conquest of Everest arrived with such amazing timing. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:45 | |
You had this beautiful young Queen, it was a wonderful pageant. | 0:20:45 | 0:20:50 | |
Somewhere up the line, the sound was getting louder. | 0:20:50 | 0:20:53 | |
You could almost trace the Queen's progress | 0:20:53 | 0:20:57 | |
by how close that sound was coming. | 0:20:57 | 0:20:59 | |
I got a fairly distant view of the Queen. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:02 | |
I got a very close-up view of a beaming Winston Churchill and I was | 0:21:02 | 0:21:07 | |
blown away by the view of the groomed horses. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:10 | |
The coronation was partly a ceremony, pomp, glory, heritage occasion. | 0:21:13 | 0:21:18 | |
But it was also given modernity, | 0:21:18 | 0:21:19 | |
because of the Queen's youthfulness and glamour. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:21 | |
And then there was also the youthfulness of the man who'd conquered Everest. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:26 | |
We did have a little radio at base camp and someone tuned in to | 0:21:26 | 0:21:30 | |
the BBC in London, and the BBC announcer was just | 0:21:30 | 0:21:35 | |
describing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
And then he broke in to the Coronation... | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
-RADIO CRACKLES: -'I'm able to announce that the New Zealander, Hillary, | 0:21:41 | 0:21:47 | |
'has succeeded in conquering Mount Everest.' | 0:21:47 | 0:21:51 | |
And then, almost for the first time, I felt, "My God, we've climbed this, | 0:21:51 | 0:21:55 | |
"and we've had authoritative support from the BBC in London. | 0:21:55 | 0:22:00 | |
"We've done it!" | 0:22:00 | 0:22:02 | |
We were absolutely amazed that the news of the climbing on Everest came | 0:22:03 | 0:22:09 | |
on the morning of the Coronation. | 0:22:09 | 0:22:12 | |
It was looked upon as a good omen. | 0:22:12 | 0:22:16 | |
And a gift to the Queen. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:19 | |
Think of the way in which a little bit of colour and glamour is coming | 0:22:19 | 0:22:23 | |
back into British life. Rationing is ending. | 0:22:23 | 0:22:26 | |
And then the Queen comes into this as an intensely glamorous figure. | 0:22:27 | 0:22:32 | |
The Coronation, Everest, | 0:22:32 | 0:22:34 | |
they contributed to this sense that there was a lot of confidence in the | 0:22:34 | 0:22:38 | |
idea that Britain was now moving forward. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
Suddenly, things feel a whole lot better. | 0:22:42 | 0:22:44 | |
It was the grey grimness of the war | 0:22:45 | 0:22:48 | |
and the post-war era that was coming to an end. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:51 | |
It's a different world. | 0:22:51 | 0:22:52 | |
And it's a much better world. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:54 | |
We really didn't know whether it was | 0:23:00 | 0:23:02 | |
humanly possible to reach the top of Mount Everest. | 0:23:02 | 0:23:06 | |
I was very interested in the problems of climbing. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:11 | |
The Everest problem was a physiological problem. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:16 | |
At an altitude of 29,000 feet, | 0:23:16 | 0:23:19 | |
the question was whether that was the physiological barrier. | 0:23:19 | 0:23:24 | |
One had this feeling in your mind all the time, | 0:23:27 | 0:23:30 | |
that maybe you were just pushing things | 0:23:30 | 0:23:33 | |
a bit beyond what humans were meant to do. | 0:23:33 | 0:23:37 | |
And you couldn't ignore that feeling. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
I was extremely well aware of what was happening and very hopeful that | 0:23:40 | 0:23:45 | |
they would succeed. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:46 | |
In a way, the two things were linked. | 0:23:48 | 0:23:52 | |
The triumph of Everest and possibly the triumph of the four-minute mile. | 0:23:52 | 0:23:58 | |
Sir Roger is very devoted to Britain and British tradition. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:02 | |
He saw it on this continuum of | 0:24:02 | 0:24:03 | |
achievements with Sir Edmund Hillary's summiting of Mount Everest | 0:24:03 | 0:24:08 | |
as something that would rebuild the psyche of | 0:24:08 | 0:24:10 | |
Great Britain after World War II. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:13 | |
I did find a great inspiration from the climbing of Everest. | 0:24:15 | 0:24:19 | |
The anticipation for what Sir Roger did was seeing other great runners | 0:24:19 | 0:24:23 | |
sort of inch up to that barrier and fail, and fail, and fail, and fail. | 0:24:23 | 0:24:27 | |
As if there really was some magical wall there. | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
I thought, well, this is something | 0:24:30 | 0:24:32 | |
which was hitherto not thought possible. | 0:24:32 | 0:24:35 | |
It's a question of, "Is this even possible? | 0:24:35 | 0:24:37 | |
"Who's going to maybe break through this barrier?" | 0:24:37 | 0:24:39 | |
They've done it. There is something comparable about the four-minute mile. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:44 | |
I had a plan to retire. | 0:24:56 | 0:24:58 | |
Hopefully having won the gold medal. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
And I felt that I had not done myself justice. | 0:25:03 | 0:25:08 | |
I came back home, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:10 | |
had a bit of a holiday | 0:25:10 | 0:25:11 | |
and then I started training much more seriously. | 0:25:11 | 0:25:15 | |
Roger had really, for two years, nearly two years, | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
had this as his principal objective. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:21 | |
He said to me, "Would you pace me | 0:25:21 | 0:25:23 | |
"in an attempt to do the first mile inside four minutes?" | 0:25:23 | 0:25:27 | |
The fact that so many people had been attempting it for so long | 0:25:27 | 0:25:33 | |
and had got so close, the Swedes during the war, | 0:25:33 | 0:25:37 | |
yet hadn't managed to achieve it, | 0:25:37 | 0:25:39 | |
made people feel that there was a barrier of some kind. | 0:25:39 | 0:25:44 | |
Psychologically, I thought, but some thought physiological. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:48 | |
As the Swedish runners have chipped away at the record and brought it | 0:25:48 | 0:25:51 | |
down and brought it down and brought it down, once they got to 4.01, | 0:25:51 | 0:25:54 | |
they really stalled right there. | 0:25:54 | 0:25:56 | |
Just at the precipice of making history. | 0:25:56 | 0:25:59 | |
The Swedes had the great runners Andersson and Hagg. | 0:25:59 | 0:26:02 | |
They ran miles | 0:26:02 | 0:26:04 | |
in 1944 and 1945 and, when the war ended, things weren't | 0:26:04 | 0:26:08 | |
very good in Europe, and things took a long time to catch up. | 0:26:08 | 0:26:12 | |
For nine years, almost a decade, | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
it was stuck and so I think that just made the quest to break through | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
that sort of invisible barrier feel that much more real, | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
and that much more intense. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:22 | |
People understood what the mile was. | 0:26:22 | 0:26:24 | |
It was made up of four equal laps. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:26 | |
They could understand that stage | 0:26:26 | 0:26:28 | |
and the four minutes that popped up in front of the world. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:31 | |
I think that really sort of injected some intensity | 0:26:31 | 0:26:34 | |
into the drama of the chase, because here, | 0:26:34 | 0:26:37 | |
you have people approaching this, | 0:26:37 | 0:26:39 | |
and sort of a segment of the media wondering if it's even possible. | 0:26:39 | 0:26:42 | |
I was working in London and so was Chris Brasher. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:50 | |
And Roger was working very hard at St Mary's Hospital. | 0:26:50 | 0:26:55 | |
By then, we'd formed a team with Franz Stampfl the coach. | 0:26:55 | 0:27:00 | |
He said, "I can turn you into a champion." | 0:27:00 | 0:27:05 | |
Franz Stampfl coached Chris Brasher first | 0:27:05 | 0:27:08 | |
and then...Chris Chataway joined and we gradually formed | 0:27:08 | 0:27:15 | |
this tight group of the four of us. | 0:27:15 | 0:27:19 | |
Franz Stampfl, | 0:27:19 | 0:27:20 | |
one of my regrets is that so little attention is paid to him. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:24 | |
Because I think he's a major factor in the whole story. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:27 | |
A very warm and supportive person. | 0:27:27 | 0:27:31 | |
We fell into a pattern of meeting him twice a week at the Kings Road track. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:39 | |
He was never in the conventional coaching mode of saying pick up | 0:27:39 | 0:27:43 | |
the left foot a bit less, or whatever. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:46 | |
It was all inspiration. | 0:27:46 | 0:27:48 | |
He was very, very good at that. | 0:27:49 | 0:27:51 | |
He really helped you believe that you could do better than you thought you could. | 0:27:51 | 0:27:56 | |
We did, principally, interval training, | 0:27:56 | 0:27:59 | |
10 x 400 metres and that kind of thing. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:02 | |
And then we would have supper at a restaurant. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:05 | |
And by the time you had listened to Franz, | 0:28:05 | 0:28:07 | |
and Franz never stopped talking, | 0:28:07 | 0:28:09 | |
and by the time you had listened to Franz for an hour, over supper, | 0:28:09 | 0:28:13 | |
you were absolutely convinced that the only thing in the world | 0:28:13 | 0:28:17 | |
that was worth doing was to get a superb world record. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:21 | |
So, 1953, he sort of assembles. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:23 | |
He takes a scientific approach of kind of assembling a team around him, with Chataway and Brasher. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:28 | |
As the weeks went by, aims for each lap and so on, | 0:28:28 | 0:28:33 | |
and tactics were focused. | 0:28:33 | 0:28:36 | |
It became not just a joint effort, | 0:28:36 | 0:28:40 | |
but an effort that we were all three tremendously committed to. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:46 | |
Twice in 1953, | 0:28:46 | 0:28:48 | |
he sets out with his pacesetters and makes attempts at Oxford, | 0:28:48 | 0:28:51 | |
but is foiled by the weather. | 0:28:51 | 0:28:54 | |
We were close friends by then. | 0:28:54 | 0:28:56 | |
To be in on this great joint venture together was a great thing. | 0:28:56 | 0:28:59 | |
Sir Roger certainly looks like he's in the driver's seat. | 0:29:01 | 0:29:03 | |
He made an attempt in 1953, | 0:29:03 | 0:29:07 | |
which produced a time of 4:02. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:10 | |
This was his major, major objective, | 0:29:11 | 0:29:14 | |
to get inside four minutes during 1954 | 0:29:14 | 0:29:17 | |
which he had decided it was going to be his last year. | 0:29:17 | 0:29:20 | |
And in that time, a couple of other players come on the scene. | 0:29:20 | 0:29:24 | |
The American, Wes Santee, starts to approach the four-minute barrier. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:29 | |
And then kind of out of nowhere, the Australian John Landy runs 4:02. | 0:29:29 | 0:29:33 | |
Because of the situation we had in Australia | 0:29:33 | 0:29:36 | |
where there was really nobody in 1953 | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
who could run with me, so I had to really set the pace. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:43 | |
I think there was an expectation | 0:29:43 | 0:29:46 | |
that one or another of them was going to do it. | 0:29:46 | 0:29:49 | |
December of 1953, that's summertime in Australia. | 0:29:49 | 0:29:52 | |
He's mid-season, essentially, | 0:29:52 | 0:29:53 | |
while Bannister is stuck in British winter. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:55 | |
All three of them had run 4:02 exactly. | 0:29:55 | 0:30:00 | |
Every time one of them raced, that would hit the news, | 0:30:00 | 0:30:03 | |
and they were getting closer and closer. | 0:30:03 | 0:30:06 | |
It was anyone's guess who was going to be the first, | 0:30:06 | 0:30:10 | |
between the three of them. | 0:30:10 | 0:30:11 | |
John Landy was a good runner and a very strong runner. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:16 | |
Who could tell that | 0:30:16 | 0:30:19 | |
Landy wouldn't have got it before he could next have an opportunity? | 0:30:19 | 0:30:23 | |
When I was running immediately after the war, | 0:30:23 | 0:30:26 | |
we did have the advantage of not being | 0:30:26 | 0:30:28 | |
affected greatly by the war and those other countries, | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
particularly in Europe, were affected by the war. | 0:30:31 | 0:30:34 | |
Clearly, we were anxious about what John Landy would do | 0:30:34 | 0:30:39 | |
and I certainly felt that he would break the four-minute mile. | 0:30:39 | 0:30:43 | |
Landy might break through. | 0:30:43 | 0:30:45 | |
Landy might break this, the four-minute mile. | 0:30:45 | 0:30:47 | |
There's really nothing Bannister can do about it. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:49 | |
The reason why the four-minute mile | 0:30:49 | 0:30:52 | |
was run in May of 1954 was simply that | 0:30:52 | 0:30:56 | |
John Landy was then on his way to Finland... | 0:30:56 | 0:31:00 | |
Sir Roger sets the date in early 1954, | 0:31:00 | 0:31:03 | |
when it's sort of now or never. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:05 | |
..where he had been guaranteed | 0:31:05 | 0:31:08 | |
pacing and good tracks and good weather, | 0:31:08 | 0:31:12 | |
that was why it was brought forward to be the first event of the season. | 0:31:12 | 0:31:17 | |
If he didn't do it in early 1954, it wasn't going to be him. | 0:31:17 | 0:31:21 | |
We looked at the calendar and what | 0:31:21 | 0:31:24 | |
was available and there was a match of | 0:31:24 | 0:31:26 | |
the Amateur Athletic Association against Oxford University. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:31 | |
We knew the track, Iffley Road, very well. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:34 | |
And so we decided to go for that. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:36 | |
In order to be legitimate, | 0:31:36 | 0:31:39 | |
it had to be within a meeting and it was in a meeting | 0:31:39 | 0:31:42 | |
between the Amateur Athletic Association and Oxford University, | 0:31:42 | 0:31:47 | |
and Chris Chataway, Chris Brasher and I were the three in the | 0:31:47 | 0:31:51 | |
Amateur Athletic Association team. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:54 | |
He has, sort of, an independent streak about him | 0:31:54 | 0:31:57 | |
that allowed him to do this. And that manifested in two ways. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:01 | |
He was surrounded by people, reporters and other people, | 0:32:01 | 0:32:06 | |
even other runners who were telling him, look, | 0:32:06 | 0:32:08 | |
this just isn't something that's possible. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:10 | |
What we were principally aiming at in our training | 0:32:10 | 0:32:14 | |
was ten laps in 60 seconds with a very easy lap in between. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:18 | |
And we were having difficulty, a couple of weeks before, | 0:32:18 | 0:32:20 | |
hitting the correct targets. | 0:32:20 | 0:32:22 | |
You can get to four flat, you can get to 4:01, the other runners, | 0:32:22 | 0:32:27 | |
as they inched closer to the four-minute barrier | 0:32:27 | 0:32:29 | |
sort of hit this wall. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:30 | |
And when I asked Sir Roger if that ever sort of affected him, | 0:32:30 | 0:32:34 | |
and he himself wondered if this | 0:32:34 | 0:32:35 | |
really was a barrier beyond which humans | 0:32:35 | 0:32:38 | |
could not go and he said, "Absolutely not! | 0:32:38 | 0:32:41 | |
"I'm a scientist. 4:01 and 3:59 are two seconds apart just like 4:03 and | 0:32:41 | 0:32:46 | |
"4:01 are two seconds apart." And that was it for him. | 0:32:46 | 0:32:48 | |
He was very, one would say, scientific about it. | 0:32:48 | 0:32:53 | |
Much more than the average runner. | 0:32:54 | 0:32:56 | |
And I think you needed that sort of independent streak | 0:32:56 | 0:33:00 | |
in order to break the barrier. By the same token, | 0:33:00 | 0:33:02 | |
I think Sir Roger would have had | 0:33:02 | 0:33:05 | |
every reason to say, "This isn't what I should be doing right now." | 0:33:05 | 0:33:09 | |
Chris Brasher and Roger | 0:33:09 | 0:33:11 | |
had a weekend in Scotland walking | 0:33:11 | 0:33:16 | |
and they always reckoned that that gave them a shot in the arm. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:20 | |
He's totally enmeshed in his medical studies. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:22 | |
He's extremely busy. He's not sleeping enough. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:25 | |
He has his lunch break to train to break the world record. | 0:33:25 | 0:33:29 | |
Training for May 6th was going reasonably well. | 0:33:29 | 0:33:33 | |
But the only doubt on the day was the weather. | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
We didn't publicise our intentions at all. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:43 | |
In fact we were extremely careful not to drop any hints. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:47 | |
I didn't want to advertise the fact, | 0:33:47 | 0:33:51 | |
because if the conditions were impossible, | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
I would say the attempt is off. | 0:33:55 | 0:33:58 | |
We told the McWhirters but they were | 0:33:58 | 0:34:00 | |
journalists and athletic statisticians | 0:34:00 | 0:34:04 | |
and we knew that they could be trusted. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:06 | |
This was quite a big athletics event for Oxford. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:10 | |
Because I knew there would be famous athletes competing. | 0:34:10 | 0:34:14 | |
I was in that first mile because I | 0:34:14 | 0:34:17 | |
was at that point Oxford's top miler. | 0:34:17 | 0:34:21 | |
There was this vague rumour that Bannister was going to attempt a fast time. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:26 | |
I really went into it almost as half spectator | 0:34:26 | 0:34:30 | |
and half competitor. | 0:34:30 | 0:34:32 | |
This was a marquee event, all by itself, this race. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:41 | |
I was at Guinness in Park Royal. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:42 | |
I worked in the morning | 0:34:42 | 0:34:44 | |
and then got in my car and drove to Oxford, late morning. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:49 | |
I was living in what were called digs. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:52 | |
A room in somebody's house. A little beyond the Iffley Road track. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:56 | |
I would have bicycled in. | 0:34:56 | 0:34:57 | |
Laid my bike against a tree and gone in to change | 0:34:58 | 0:35:02 | |
and chatted with team-mates. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:05 | |
Sir Roger went to the hospital that morning. | 0:35:05 | 0:35:08 | |
He and Brasher and Chataway, those guys went to work that day. | 0:35:08 | 0:35:12 | |
A group of us from my college, | 0:35:12 | 0:35:14 | |
St Catherine's College Oxford, decided to go along, | 0:35:14 | 0:35:19 | |
although curiously two of them, rather laid-back, | 0:35:19 | 0:35:22 | |
thought it looks as though it's going to rain, | 0:35:22 | 0:35:25 | |
and so they opted out. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:26 | |
When I got to Iffley Road, I thought it was all right. | 0:35:26 | 0:35:29 | |
The flag above the church | 0:35:29 | 0:35:32 | |
opposite, it was fluttering slightly, | 0:35:32 | 0:35:36 | |
which was worrying, because wind is | 0:35:36 | 0:35:41 | |
the biggest enemy, even with Roger having us in front of him. | 0:35:41 | 0:35:45 | |
I met Franz, not planned, on the train going up to Oxford. | 0:35:45 | 0:35:50 | |
And by that time it was raining and it was windy. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:55 | |
And I said, you know, this weather is no good. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:58 | |
So I was really in a very | 0:35:58 | 0:36:02 | |
doubtful state of mind. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:04 | |
And Franz Stampfl, he said, "If you don't take this chance today, | 0:36:05 | 0:36:12 | |
"then you may never get another chance." | 0:36:12 | 0:36:16 | |
And in that case, no four-minute mile for Britain. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:20 | |
He said to me, "You can run a 3:56 mile. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:25 | |
"That's what I think you can do." | 0:36:25 | 0:36:26 | |
When Roger got down to the stadium, | 0:36:28 | 0:36:30 | |
I think it was a little bit after me. | 0:36:30 | 0:36:34 | |
It was clear that he still had some doubts about the weather. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:39 | |
There was a flag, a St George's flag, | 0:36:39 | 0:36:41 | |
flying on the church steeple at the top of the track. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:45 | |
I used that during the afternoon as a wind gauge. | 0:36:45 | 0:36:48 | |
-TANNOY: -First call for the one-mile run, | 0:36:48 | 0:36:51 | |
all athletes please check in with the clerk. | 0:36:51 | 0:36:53 | |
Being poverty-stricken students, | 0:36:53 | 0:36:55 | |
we weren't going to pay to sit in the stand, but we decided we would | 0:36:55 | 0:37:00 | |
buy a cheaper ticket and just stand just beyond the spectator stand and | 0:37:00 | 0:37:07 | |
this happened to give us the perfect view of the finishing line. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:11 | |
It wasn't until half an hour before that I really made up my mind that, | 0:37:14 | 0:37:20 | |
if I didn't attempt it on this occasion, | 0:37:20 | 0:37:23 | |
I might never get another attempt before John Landy did it. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:27 | |
So that was really the final crunch. | 0:37:27 | 0:37:29 | |
I may say, Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher were getting a bit | 0:37:29 | 0:37:33 | |
impatient with me. | 0:37:33 | 0:37:34 | |
They said, "We've come here to do this, well, are we going to do it?" | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
-TANNOY: -This is the second call for the one-mile run. | 0:37:38 | 0:37:41 | |
Please, could all athletes check in... | 0:37:41 | 0:37:42 | |
Norris McWhirter did notify the BBC | 0:37:42 | 0:37:46 | |
that they ought to have a camera there, | 0:37:46 | 0:37:49 | |
because there might be something interesting in the mile. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:54 | |
It added, I suppose, to the tension and the excitement of the day, | 0:37:54 | 0:37:59 | |
looking around at what was quite a full stadium. | 0:37:59 | 0:38:02 | |
The crowd was of about 1,500, which is a lot, for Oxford. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:08 | |
Realising that nobody else knew what it was | 0:38:08 | 0:38:13 | |
that we were going to attempt to do. | 0:38:13 | 0:38:16 | |
-TANNOY: -This is the final call for the one-mile. | 0:38:16 | 0:38:19 | |
Can athletes please make their way to the start? | 0:38:19 | 0:38:22 | |
I did not see face-to-face any of | 0:38:23 | 0:38:26 | |
the three, Chataway, Brasher or Bannister, | 0:38:26 | 0:38:31 | |
until we were gathering at the starting line. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
They were almost enclosed in a bubble. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:36 | |
They were so focused on what they were doing. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:41 | |
-TANNOY: -In lane one, representing Oxford University Athletic Club, | 0:38:41 | 0:38:45 | |
Yale and University College, GF Dole. | 0:38:45 | 0:38:49 | |
In lane two, representing the Amateur Athletic Association, | 0:38:49 | 0:38:53 | |
CW Brasher... | 0:38:53 | 0:38:54 | |
I got to the starting line | 0:38:56 | 0:39:00 | |
and Chris Brasher, I was on the pole, | 0:39:00 | 0:39:04 | |
Chris Brasher was immediately on my right. | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
-TANNOY: -..the Amateur Athletic Association, RG Bannister. | 0:39:07 | 0:39:12 | |
In lane five, representing the Amateur Athletic Association... | 0:39:12 | 0:39:16 | |
Relief, as it always is, when, eventually | 0:39:17 | 0:39:21 | |
the minutes had ebbed away and we were actually there ready to go. | 0:39:21 | 0:39:25 | |
I was determined not to get boxed in. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:27 | |
That was as far ahead as I was thinking. | 0:39:27 | 0:39:30 | |
I saw that the flag on the church steeple | 0:39:30 | 0:39:33 | |
was not blowing as strongly, | 0:39:33 | 0:39:35 | |
and I just took that as a sort of final comment by the weather | 0:39:35 | 0:39:40 | |
that you've got to take a chance. | 0:39:40 | 0:39:42 | |
Runners, to your marks. | 0:39:57 | 0:40:00 | |
GUNSHOT | 0:40:00 | 0:40:01 | |
We had no idea, really, that the attempt was on. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:10 | |
Brasher had not got far enough ahead to be able to pull in. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:15 | |
And as we went into the turn, | 0:40:16 | 0:40:18 | |
I eased off a little bit so that I wouldn't keep him on the outside. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:22 | |
Chris Brasher, as planned, went straight into the lead | 0:40:22 | 0:40:27 | |
and Roger did say, | 0:40:27 | 0:40:30 | |
I forget, I think it must have been about halfway through | 0:40:30 | 0:40:33 | |
the first lap, you know, "Faster, faster." | 0:40:33 | 0:40:35 | |
He goes off, very full of running. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:38 | |
I feel so fresh. | 0:40:38 | 0:40:40 | |
I haven't done anything for five days before it. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:43 | |
Which was my usual preparation for a race. | 0:40:43 | 0:40:46 | |
You feel so eager, so I say, "Faster, faster." | 0:40:46 | 0:40:50 | |
Chris, and this was his huge contribution to the occasion, | 0:40:50 | 0:40:53 | |
took no notice and | 0:40:53 | 0:40:55 | |
went on at the pace that he was setting which was actually correct. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:59 | |
I had some fantasies of being able | 0:40:59 | 0:41:02 | |
to stay with them for a reasonable time | 0:41:02 | 0:41:06 | |
but after about a quarter of a mile I knew that this was something, | 0:41:06 | 0:41:10 | |
I can't keep this up. | 0:41:10 | 0:41:12 | |
So he took no notice, and we came through the quarter mile in 58 | 0:41:12 | 0:41:17 | |
which was absolutely right. | 0:41:17 | 0:41:19 | |
By the time they got to | 0:41:19 | 0:41:21 | |
the end of the first quarter, I would have been, say, | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
ten yards or more back. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:26 | |
-TANNOY: -57.7 seconds, 440 yards. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:31 | |
57.7, I think. | 0:41:31 | 0:41:33 | |
And Norman Barrett and I, my friend | 0:41:33 | 0:41:36 | |
who was with me, looked at each other. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:39 | |
"Very fast!" | 0:41:39 | 0:41:40 | |
Chris was still on schedule at about | 0:41:40 | 0:41:43 | |
a couple of minutes for the two laps. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:45 | |
I was very definitely watching it all. | 0:41:45 | 0:41:47 | |
By the end of the second lap, he was still going as planned. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:51 | |
The half-mile was announced at 1:58.3. | 0:41:51 | 0:41:55 | |
And there were gasps from the spectators. | 0:41:57 | 0:42:01 | |
I mean, this is serious running. | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
-TANNOY: -The half mile, 1:58.3. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:08 | |
I was surprised when Brasher kept the lead after | 0:42:08 | 0:42:15 | |
the end of the half. | 0:42:15 | 0:42:17 | |
It was planned that he would go to 2.5 | 0:42:17 | 0:42:20 | |
laps and I would get as close to 3.5 as I could. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:25 | |
Brasher kept on for another 220 yards | 0:42:28 | 0:42:31 | |
and Chataway took over on the middle of the back stretch. | 0:42:31 | 0:42:34 | |
He was staying around the bend on the third lap, | 0:42:34 | 0:42:37 | |
so I overtook him at the beginning of the back straight. | 0:42:37 | 0:42:41 | |
If you watch the film, you see that Brasher, | 0:42:41 | 0:42:43 | |
at that point, really slowed down. | 0:42:43 | 0:42:47 | |
I ran the third lap with no problem. | 0:42:47 | 0:42:49 | |
I was concentrating hard, not to let the pace slip at all. | 0:42:49 | 0:42:54 | |
At the bell, the time was 3:00.7 seconds. | 0:42:54 | 0:42:58 | |
And this was announced. | 0:42:59 | 0:43:01 | |
-TANNOY: -The time at three-quarters distance, 3:00.7 seconds. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:06 | |
The crowd began to go mad. | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
And they were roaring. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:11 | |
Chris Chataway took over and the time then was 3:01. | 0:43:11 | 0:43:18 | |
My friend remembers a guy in front of me holding his head in his hands. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:23 | |
He couldn't believe what was happening. | 0:43:23 | 0:43:25 | |
Not surprisingly we were slowing, | 0:43:25 | 0:43:29 | |
and I was rather concerned but I heard that the lap time of 3:01 and | 0:43:29 | 0:43:35 | |
realised that I had to do a last lap in 59. | 0:43:35 | 0:43:39 | |
Past the third lap, I was beginning to have difficulty. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:43 | |
Chataway was still in the lead, | 0:43:43 | 0:43:46 | |
still led around the bottom turn of the last lap... | 0:43:46 | 0:43:50 | |
I didn't want to overtake him too soon. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:54 | |
..and led until I think maybe a little past | 0:43:55 | 0:43:58 | |
the middle of the back straight. | 0:43:58 | 0:44:00 | |
I waited and didn't overtake Chris | 0:44:00 | 0:44:05 | |
until the beginning of the back straight. | 0:44:05 | 0:44:08 | |
Bannister blew by him very decisively | 0:44:11 | 0:44:14 | |
and Chataway did not slow down. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:16 | |
Roger swept past me on that back straight, and he looked superb. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:20 | |
He looked absolutely terrific. | 0:44:20 | 0:44:22 | |
He was so well-known for his devastating finish. | 0:44:22 | 0:44:25 | |
We all said, "Can he reproduce it at this pace?" | 0:44:25 | 0:44:30 | |
I was in the last turn, | 0:44:30 | 0:44:32 | |
probably coming in to the last turn when he went down the last straight. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:37 | |
And I could see that he was not losing anything. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:41 | |
He was flying. | 0:44:41 | 0:44:42 | |
I had no particular recognition of the difficulties, | 0:44:42 | 0:44:46 | |
except I had to run as hard as I could for the tape. | 0:44:46 | 0:44:51 | |
Gradually felt fatigue, ascending my legs, | 0:44:51 | 0:44:56 | |
but just managed to get to the tape, threw myself at it. | 0:44:56 | 0:45:00 | |
He just flung himself over the line. | 0:45:00 | 0:45:03 | |
But I wasn't sure that I had broken it. | 0:45:03 | 0:45:07 | |
It was, it was very emotional. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:11 | |
It was terribly exciting. | 0:45:11 | 0:45:14 | |
As I came down the last straight, I could see the excitement. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:20 | |
People jumping about and so on. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:22 | |
We'd gone through this terrible war, | 0:45:22 | 0:45:24 | |
and so there was a sort of trepidation | 0:45:24 | 0:45:28 | |
and everyone was thinking, "Well, has it all been in vain?" | 0:45:28 | 0:45:33 | |
When I came down to the finish, | 0:45:33 | 0:45:35 | |
I almost had to find my way to the finish line because people were | 0:45:35 | 0:45:39 | |
beginning to congregate. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:40 | |
So we were left waiting for a few minutes. | 0:45:40 | 0:45:42 | |
Was it the world record, but not under four minutes? | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
The three principal runners were | 0:45:46 | 0:45:49 | |
clustered with their immediate friends and supporters, | 0:45:49 | 0:45:54 | |
right by the finish line, waiting to hear. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:57 | |
I put my arms round them. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:00 | |
And of course there were a lot of | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
pictures immediately after the finish, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
but I didn't know, and I couldn't tell them, until a time had elapsed. | 0:46:06 | 0:46:12 | |
There was silence. There was a waiting for the announcement. | 0:46:12 | 0:46:17 | |
And there was a delay. | 0:46:17 | 0:46:19 | |
It seemed to take forever for them to announce. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:21 | |
Norris McWhirter had this very English sort of laid-back feel. | 0:46:21 | 0:46:25 | |
But he did have a sense of drama. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:27 | |
And he began to announce the result. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:32 | |
-TANNOY: -Ladies and gentlemen, here is the result | 0:46:32 | 0:46:36 | |
of event nine, the one mile. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:38 | |
Here is the result... | 0:46:38 | 0:46:40 | |
of event number nine, the one mile. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:44 | |
-TANNOY: -First, number 41, RG Bannister, | 0:46:44 | 0:46:48 | |
Amateur Athletics Association and | 0:46:48 | 0:46:50 | |
formerly of Exeter and Merton Colleges, Oxford. | 0:46:50 | 0:46:53 | |
Then he went on, of course, | 0:46:53 | 0:46:55 | |
to relate the fact that Bannister was the holder | 0:46:55 | 0:46:58 | |
of the English native and British national | 0:46:58 | 0:47:01 | |
and British allcomers' record for the mile. | 0:47:01 | 0:47:03 | |
And the crowd groaned. | 0:47:03 | 0:47:05 | |
And you don't normally get that in an announcement. | 0:47:05 | 0:47:08 | |
I knew I must be close, but it was not at all certain | 0:47:08 | 0:47:12 | |
that I had broken it. | 0:47:12 | 0:47:14 | |
Second was CJ Chataway of the Achilles Club and then came a long | 0:47:14 | 0:47:20 | |
list of Chataway's credentials. | 0:47:20 | 0:47:22 | |
And I turned to Norman and I said, "He must have done it!" | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
-TANNOY: -With a time that is a new meeting and track record... | 0:47:26 | 0:47:30 | |
And then there was silence and a pause... | 0:47:30 | 0:47:33 | |
and McWhirter said... | 0:47:33 | 0:47:35 | |
..the winner's time... | 0:47:36 | 0:47:37 | |
..is a new track record. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:40 | |
Yes? And so, what? | 0:47:42 | 0:47:45 | |
After another pause... | 0:47:45 | 0:47:47 | |
..the winning time, subject to ratification, | 0:47:48 | 0:47:52 | |
will be a new English native, British national... | 0:47:52 | 0:47:56 | |
-TANNOY: -..allcomers' European, | 0:47:56 | 0:48:00 | |
British Empire... | 0:48:00 | 0:48:02 | |
And pending approval, a new world record. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:05 | |
And we gasped all round. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:07 | |
Then he said, after another long pause... | 0:48:09 | 0:48:12 | |
-TANNOY: -The time was... | 0:48:13 | 0:48:14 | |
..in a time of... | 0:48:14 | 0:48:16 | |
..three minutes... | 0:48:21 | 0:48:24 | |
and then the number of seconds was obscured by the crowd's excitement. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:29 | |
-TANNOY: -Three minutes... | 0:48:29 | 0:48:32 | |
Everyone exploded, and people ran all over the track, | 0:48:32 | 0:48:36 | |
and people didn't know how to express their joy. | 0:48:36 | 0:48:39 | |
There hadn't been joy of this kind since the war. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:44 | |
There was a sense, once the time had been announced, | 0:48:44 | 0:48:46 | |
that it was just a little too much to process. | 0:48:46 | 0:48:50 | |
Oh, wow! | 0:48:50 | 0:48:52 | |
That was a great moment. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:54 | |
People lifted Bannister, like a Roman hero, onto shoulders, | 0:48:54 | 0:48:58 | |
and they carried him round the track. | 0:48:58 | 0:49:01 | |
This is something to think about. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:03 | |
This is something that they thought was impossible, and by golly, | 0:49:03 | 0:49:08 | |
it is possible, and I saw it happen. | 0:49:08 | 0:49:11 | |
Once it was done, it wasn't low-key any more. | 0:49:16 | 0:49:18 | |
The sports night then was | 0:49:18 | 0:49:22 | |
on the night of the race. | 0:49:22 | 0:49:25 | |
We all went up to the BBC, interviewed there | 0:49:25 | 0:49:29 | |
and then it was masses of press and so on. | 0:49:29 | 0:49:31 | |
It was something to write home about. | 0:49:31 | 0:49:34 | |
Very definitely. And I did. | 0:49:34 | 0:49:36 | |
And I seem to remember that Harold Macmillan | 0:49:36 | 0:49:39 | |
was handed a note in the House of Commons and he stood up, | 0:49:39 | 0:49:42 | |
with the permission of the Speaker, | 0:49:42 | 0:49:45 | |
and said, "I've just been handed a | 0:49:45 | 0:49:47 | |
"note which tells me that Roger Bannister | 0:49:47 | 0:49:50 | |
"ran a mile in 3:59.4." | 0:49:50 | 0:49:55 | |
And all the MPs cheered! | 0:49:55 | 0:49:57 | |
Of course, Brasher had arranged that | 0:49:57 | 0:50:01 | |
we went to the Sloan Court restaurant | 0:50:01 | 0:50:04 | |
with our girlfriends. | 0:50:04 | 0:50:05 | |
"In view of this remarkable achievement by an Englishman, | 0:50:05 | 0:50:09 | |
"I propose the house adjourns for 3:59.4 seconds!" | 0:50:09 | 0:50:14 | |
I don't think I was aware of what the impact might be | 0:50:14 | 0:50:20 | |
until we got the early newspapers at about two o'clock in the morning. | 0:50:20 | 0:50:24 | |
In order to, sort of, capture the real excitement | 0:50:32 | 0:50:35 | |
that there was about it, and the atmosphere, | 0:50:35 | 0:50:37 | |
there was a kind of feeling that | 0:50:37 | 0:50:40 | |
this was the kind of start of the new Elizabethan age. | 0:50:40 | 0:50:44 | |
It was the opening of a new era, | 0:50:44 | 0:50:46 | |
a moment of national renewal after the war. | 0:50:46 | 0:50:48 | |
It's a watershed moment. There are great achievements by Brits, | 0:50:48 | 0:50:51 | |
the economy is starting to really boom... | 0:50:51 | 0:50:53 | |
Everest, the Coronation and the four-minute mile would provide this | 0:50:53 | 0:50:57 | |
kind of reassurance that Britain is still a great country. | 0:50:57 | 0:51:00 | |
Everest was conquered, and we had the Coronation, all on the same day. | 0:51:00 | 0:51:05 | |
And then the first four-minute mile. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:07 | |
They were like... | 0:51:07 | 0:51:08 | |
They were like giving a glass of water to a man dying of thirst. | 0:51:10 | 0:51:13 | |
I am pleased that it was done. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:16 | |
I'm pleased that it was done with the help of my friends. | 0:51:16 | 0:51:22 | |
I was very lucky to have my two friends, | 0:51:22 | 0:51:25 | |
Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, | 0:51:25 | 0:51:27 | |
who helped to make some of the running early on. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:30 | |
And I certainly attribute a lot of it to their presence in the race. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:37 | |
And I am pleased that it was in Britain. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:40 | |
Everest had been climbed. | 0:51:40 | 0:51:42 | |
It was the Queen's reign starting, | 0:51:42 | 0:51:45 | |
so all these things seemed to have a symmetry. | 0:51:45 | 0:51:49 | |
As I have said, I thought winning Olympic races | 0:51:49 | 0:51:54 | |
is more important than the four-minute mile. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:58 | |
It so happens that the rest of the world thinks otherwise. | 0:51:58 | 0:52:02 | |
And it is Landy, running quite easily, relaxed and beautifully. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:19 | |
Not quite such a long stride as Bannister. | 0:52:19 | 0:52:21 | |
Landy comes down the straight. | 0:52:21 | 0:52:23 | |
No sooner does Sir Roger Bannister | 0:52:23 | 0:52:25 | |
break the magical four-minute barrier then, | 0:52:25 | 0:52:27 | |
the very next month, John Landy runs 3:58. | 0:52:27 | 0:52:30 | |
And this sets up, later in the year, one of the greatest, | 0:52:30 | 0:52:34 | |
most dramatic races of all time. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:35 | |
I wound up going to the British Empire Games in Vancouver, | 0:52:40 | 0:52:45 | |
where Landy raced against Bannister. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:47 | |
My father thought that that would be kind of the ultimate present for me, | 0:52:47 | 0:52:50 | |
and he was right. | 0:52:50 | 0:52:51 | |
With his beautiful, prancing stride, ready, poised, | 0:52:51 | 0:52:55 | |
here goes Landy, can Bannister catch him? | 0:52:55 | 0:52:57 | |
There is none of his famed spurt at the moment. | 0:52:57 | 0:52:59 | |
Landy is, I think, drawing slightly away. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:02 | |
Landy is running beautifully. | 0:53:02 | 0:53:03 | |
No, Bannister's coming up on him now. 150 yards to go, | 0:53:03 | 0:53:06 | |
and Bannister is gaining ever so slightly with each stride. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:09 | |
And then Bannister shifted to another gear, | 0:53:09 | 0:53:11 | |
and the crowd was so loud, | 0:53:11 | 0:53:14 | |
Landy couldn't hear him. But Landy turned to the inside to see how far | 0:53:14 | 0:53:17 | |
back Bannister was. And Bannister was right on his shoulder. | 0:53:17 | 0:53:20 | |
So then, when he looked around, Bannister had gone by him. | 0:53:20 | 0:53:23 | |
150 yards to go, and Bannister is coming up to Landy's elbow. | 0:53:23 | 0:53:26 | |
Bannister has passed Landy. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:27 | |
Landy comes into the straight, and it's going to be Bannister's race. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:31 | |
He's striding absolutely magnificently, | 0:53:31 | 0:53:33 | |
as Bannister breasts the tape now, and Landy's second... | 0:53:33 | 0:53:36 | |
That moment really bestowed a love for track and field. | 0:53:36 | 0:53:40 | |
It intensified it enormously. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:41 | |
And what would my life be if that hadn't happened? | 0:53:41 | 0:53:45 | |
It was... It was probably the best bonding experience I'd had with my | 0:53:45 | 0:53:51 | |
father in my whole life. | 0:53:51 | 0:53:52 | |
So it really had a significant role to play for me, personally. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
There are a handful of names in the world, | 0:53:55 | 0:53:58 | |
people will instinctively know who you're talking about. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:01 | |
The first four-minute mile was | 0:54:01 | 0:54:03 | |
voted THE outstanding British sporting achievement | 0:54:03 | 0:54:06 | |
of the 20th century. | 0:54:06 | 0:54:08 | |
Neil Armstrong, John Glenn. | 0:54:08 | 0:54:10 | |
People that have done things for the very first time. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:13 | |
Sir Edmund Hillary. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:14 | |
That sort of calibre of achiever that people hold | 0:54:14 | 0:54:17 | |
Sir Roger Bannister in. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:18 | |
Britain didn't have too many world sporting heroes. | 0:54:18 | 0:54:22 | |
But Roger Bannister was this person | 0:54:22 | 0:54:25 | |
who kind of overarched all of that somehow. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:28 | |
As amazing as summiting Mount Everest was, | 0:54:28 | 0:54:31 | |
now, around 3,500 people have done that. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:33 | |
Whereas only 1,314 men have run under four minutes in the mile. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:39 | |
Bannister had the mental and physical ability | 0:54:39 | 0:54:43 | |
to push himself through that barrier and show the way to others. | 0:54:43 | 0:54:48 | |
I went to school that day. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:49 | |
My history teacher Jim Norton was also the basketball coach. | 0:54:49 | 0:54:53 | |
And he said, "I suppose you've all read that the four-minute mile was | 0:54:53 | 0:54:56 | |
"broken yesterday. I just want to tell you, | 0:54:56 | 0:54:58 | |
"as a man who spent his life in physical education, | 0:54:58 | 0:55:01 | |
"it's physically impossible. I think those watches were wrong." | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
If I'd finished my career and had never broken the world mile record, | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
I would've felt as though I'd missed out on something. | 0:55:07 | 0:55:11 | |
And suddenly I was on my own with a | 0:55:11 | 0:55:13 | |
lap to go, and the bizarre thing was, the whole last lap, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:16 | |
I was replaying in my mind the lines from Bannister's book about how he | 0:55:16 | 0:55:20 | |
felt on the last lap of his historic race. | 0:55:20 | 0:55:23 | |
I remember getting about 20, 30 metres from the line. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:26 | |
Kind of thinking, "I'm going to do it." | 0:55:26 | 0:55:28 | |
I could see the clock. And as I crossed the line I kind of point at | 0:55:28 | 0:55:31 | |
it with this stupid grin on my face. | 0:55:31 | 0:55:33 | |
And I remember doing the lap of honour. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:36 | |
Because of Bannister, I was running around that last lap | 0:55:36 | 0:55:38 | |
thinking, "Wow, you know, you're part of history." | 0:55:38 | 0:55:41 | |
The announcer said, | 0:55:41 | 0:55:43 | |
it's happened again and announced | 0:55:43 | 0:55:45 | |
that the time of 3:59.6 had been run. | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
Out of great respect, I didn't break Bannister's track record of 3:59.4, | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
and he came out on the track, I got to meet him, shake his hand, | 0:55:52 | 0:55:57 | |
have my picture taken. | 0:55:57 | 0:55:58 | |
It really changed my life. It's one of the greatest human achievements | 0:55:58 | 0:56:02 | |
ever. Something that I would put on par with going to the moon. | 0:56:02 | 0:56:04 | |
Because it's a question of, can we actually do this? | 0:56:04 | 0:56:07 | |
If we can show ourselves we can do this, | 0:56:07 | 0:56:09 | |
then there's all sorts of other things we know we can do. | 0:56:09 | 0:56:12 |