Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book. Larry Olmsted

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">They memorized every important date in world history, rivers and mountain ranges, and every world capital - and later every record in the Guinness book.”

      The twins’ most emphatic area of passion was sports, and they were no mere armchair enthusiasts. They were outstanding athletes who competed at the national and international level in track, and also excelled at rugby . Both attended Oxford’s Trinity College, where they ran the 100-yard sprint, and Norris was good enough to race against (and lose to) Trinidadian Emmanuel MacDonald Bailey, then the UK record holder in the event. He was selected as a ‘possible’ in the 200 metres for the 1948 British Olympic team but strained a hamstring before securing a spot on the squad. Their success on the track was all the more notable given the stiff competition: Ross and Norris were on the same Oxford team as the legendary Roger Bannister, who became a lifelong friend before he became famous as the first human to run a mile in under four minutes. Also on the track team was Chris Chataway , another friend who would later pace Bannister’s epic mile and become the world record holder at the 5000 metres. Completing their education after an interruption for military service, all four were part of a 20-man team chosen to represent Oxford in its first post-war foreign athletic tour, a group that turned out to be quite a distinguished bunch. As Norris wrote, “It would have taken a clairvoyant rather than an acute observer to predict that among that carefree band there were members who were to become a prime minister [Ratu Kamisese Mara, Fiji], Europe’s fastest sprinter, history’s first four-minute miler, a leading headmaster and [in the case of Ross] the first editor ever to sell 25,000,000 copies of a book in a lifetime.”

      Aside from a brief stint serving on separate ships during the war, the twins were rarely far from each other’s side, and as a result, graduation steered them down an unusual path together. “It never occurred to either of us that we would do anything separately or that we would be employees of some great company. It was always tacitly assumed that whatever career we had, it would be together and it would be as private enterprisers,” Norris wrote matter-of-factly. In 1949, drawing on their lifelong passion for sports, facts and statistics, as well as their childhood experience on the periphery of Fleet Street’s journalistic hub, the twins formulated a plan to set up their own business supplying facts and figures to newspapers, yearbooks, encyclopaedias and advertisers. Knowing the speciality business would take time to research, launch and build, they simultaneously began writing their first book, Get to Your Marks, subtitled A Short History of World, Commonwealth, European and British Athletics, to provide some income. That book was published in 1951, and two decades later The Guide to British Track and Field Literature from 1275-1968 would call their debut “a landmark in athletics literature. The text is distinguished by a degree of precision and thoroughness which no athletics historian had achieved before. In Britain the McWhirters spearheaded the emphasis on statistical data which is a feature of modern athletics writing.”

      Research showing that no other fact business of its kind existed did not worry the brothers, who instead found this void encouraging, and on 2 March 1951, McWhirter Twins Ltd was formally registered as a business . They immediately began cold-calling newspapers, trying to sell them their factfinding services. Due to fluke timing, one such sales call quickly led not to the sale of facts but to the offer of a fulltime job for Ross with London’s Star as the lawn tennis and rugby correspondent, as well as part-time seasonal freelance coverage of other sports for Norris. Thinking it over, the McWhirters concluded that Ross’s income would give them some stability, while Norris would still have enough time to run the upstart fact-finding firm. Before long, their rising stars in sports and sportswriting led Norris to begin doing part-time event commentary on radio for the BBC as well. Then, in an eerie Guinness precursor, one of the first substantive pieces of business landed by McWhirter Twins Ltd was a contract to produce ‘interesting information’ to be printed on boxes of Shredded Wheat breakfast cereal. The twins clinched the deal and won the bid only when they suggested using ‘superlative objects and people’ , accompanied by artist’s renderings, for the cereal box factoids.

      Things progressed smoothly for the twins for a few years, with Ross covering major events such as Wimbledon and his twin researching quirky cereal box facts and growing his reputation as a sportscaster. Norris also took a position editing Athletics World magazine in 1952, which he would continue to do through the amazingly busy next four years in the twins’ lives. They seemed to be cut from the same cloth as Sir Hugh, keeping their hands in an ever-growing number of enterprises. Norris’s work with BBC radio also took a major step forward s with his broadcasts from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which in turn led to a job on television as part of the BBC’s commentary team for the next four Olympic Games: Rome (1960), Tokyo (1964), Mexico (1968) and Munich (1972). Before long, this on-camera experience would prove instrumental in promoting the Guinness brand.

      The McWhirters’ growing success came to a head in 1954, the year Norris dubbed ‘Annus Mirabilis’ in his book Ross, an amalgam autobiography and biography of his brother. The miracles referred to were the breaking of the four-minute mile by their friend Roger Bannister and the grouse v golden plover question by Sir Hugh Beaver. The first occurred on 6 May at the familiar Oxford University track where Norris, Ross and Roger had run for so many years (and where Ashrita Furman would later make a record-breaking pilgrimage, albeit on a pogo stick). Norris was hired to provide the track commentary through the public address system, and knowing how much closer his friend Roger was to the mark than many observers suspected, he took great pains the night before the race to rehearse a ‘spontaneous’ announcement, should Bannister indeed deliver the historic benchmark. By a meagre six-tenths of a second he did just that, and slowly and without emotion Norris announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen. Here is the result of event number nine, the one mile . First, number 41, R. G. Bannister, Amateur Athletic Association, and formerly of Exeter and Merton colleges, with a time that is a new meeting and track record, and which, subject to ratification will be a new English native, British Empire and World’s record: the time three minutes…” The rest of his announcement, “fifty-nine point four seconds,” was forever obscured by the loud and riotous reaction of the crowd, some 1200 strong. So important was this event in sports history that Norris later said, “The total crowd was estimated at 1200 and I have met all 10,000 of them since!”

      As the world famous record book by the twins would prove dramatically for the next six decades, records are meant to be broken, but firsts are forever. Bannister’s new mark stood for just 46 days, and it would be the next holder, Australian John Landy, whose 3:57.9 would grace the mile entry in the first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, though Bannister would long secure a place in its pages alongside the likes of Neil Armstrong and Sir Edmund Hillary for historic firsts. The twins were not yet done with mile records: later that year Landy’s success set the stage for a hugely anticipated showdown between the two sprinters at the 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, where Norris reported that scalpers were getting upward of $100 Canadian, a stunning amount at the time, for the event, dubbed ‘The Miracle Mile’ by the press. The McWhirters were once again on hand to witness track and field history when Bannister won in 3:58.8 with Landy less than a second behind him, making it history’s first double sub-four-minute mile.

      Around the time the twins were revelling in Vancouver, Sir Hugh Beaver was bird hunting in Ireland. Connecting these dots was the job of another employee of the famous brewery, outstanding Oxford track and world-record sprinter Chris Chataway, team mate of the McWhirters. Chataway had just given СКАЧАТЬ