The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb

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      With a time of 4:06.8, Lovelock’s rival, the American Glenn Cunningham, seized the mile record only eleven months after the New Zealander had claimed it. The ‘Kansas Powerhouse’ was legend long before he ran the fastest mile in the world. At the age of 7, he and his brother tried to stoke the fire in their small schoolhouse’s stove by dousing the coals with kerosene. His brother died as a result of the accident, and Glenn burned his legs almost beyond repair. During recovery he found walking more painful than running, and an athlete was born. Cunningham learned to work around his disability, and at his first inter-varsity mile at the University of Kansas, he exploded on the last lap to beat the field. His running inspired a generation of Kansas farm boys and gave Americans the hope that the four-minute mile could be theirs.

      Sydney Wooderson brought the mile record back to England in 1937. Walter George, now 79 years old, was there to see it. At five feet six inches and 126lb, Wooderson was an atypical miler. When he stepped on to the track in his thick glasses and with the meek demeanour of a solicitor’s clerk, he looked the underdog. Once running, however, he was an indomitable force. He dealt with his loss to Lovelock at the 1936 Olympics by staging an attempt to beat Cunningham’s mile time. On 28 August 1937 at Motspur Park, he arranged for pacemakers from his athletic club to lead him around the first three laps. Using his famed kick, he handled the last lap alone and registered a time of 4:06.4.

      Slowly, by investing more and more time and energy in training, milers approached the goal of four laps of the track in four minutes. But six and a half seconds was a long time off, and the small reductions made by the best runners to the record were just that, small reductions. The possibility of seeing ‘the other side’ of the numerical barrier was looking increasingly uncertain.

      When Swedish runners Gundar Haegg and Arne Andersson finished their epic battles by the end of the Second World War, the four-minute mile appeared unattainable. Of the two, Haegg had a more natural, flowing stride, but Andersson trained harder. A year apart in age, they reached their peak at the same time. Separately, they were the finest milers, in terms of fitness and form, possibly ever to have graced the track; racing against each other, they looked to be the best that ever would. Over the course of three and a half years, Haegg and Andersson passed the mile record back and forth to each other:

      Their duels inspired great performances, yet the barrier still stood untouched. Journalists and statisticians tried to convince the athletics world that the record would inevitably be run. They calculated that the average world-class miler could sustain a 7.33-yard-per-second speed (or 15mph). This meant that the difference between Haegg’s best time and the four-minute mile was a short twelve yards – less than 1 per cent of the race’s total distance. Nothing. But others disagreed, quite publicly as well. Coach Brutus Hamilton, one of the most revered figures in athletics, published ‘The Ultimate of Human Effort’, listing the perfect records for the javelin, shot-put, 100m, 400m, mile, 5,000m, and 10,000m beyond which man could never go. Hamilton backed up his analysis with detailed statistics, but many would have considered his word final had he simply jotted these ‘perfect records’ down on a cocktail napkin. Of the question ‘Can the mile be run in four minutes flat?’ Hamilton wrote, ‘Not quite.’ The fastest time that would ever be possible, he stated, was 4:01.6. Although Hamilton, who wrote the article in 1935, had by 1945 been disproved by two-tenths of a second, he still found the idea of anyone running faster difficult to imagine.

      Many wanted the bogey to go away, including the 1912 Olympic 1,500m champion Colonel Strode-Jackson, who wrote at the height of the Haegg–Andersson struggle, ‘When we stop this nonsense of running like a metronome and with the watch always in mind, we will get back to real racing, the triumph of one runner over another. That is what racing was meant to be and what it will be when we get the four-minute myth out of the way.’

      Myth or not, twelve yards or many more, the barrier remained, and with each passing year, as runners attempted to break through its walls and failed, the mile barrier grew in notoriety. By 1952, as Frank Deford, one of the finest writers to report on the challenge, pointed out, ‘The Poles had been reached, the mouth of the Nile found, the deepest oceans marked, and the wildest jungles trekked, but the distance of the ground that measured a mile continued to resist all efforts to traverse it, on foot, in less than four minutes.’

      The 1952 Olympic flame had barely been snuffed out in the Helsinki stadium when the editorials and reviews of the Games began to spin off the presses. Two points were indisputable: the Finns had proved to be fine hosts of the competition, and more records were broken in these Games than in any other Olympics in history.

      Fewer than forty-eight hours after the closing ceremony in Helsinki, another competition was held, this time in London’s White City stadium, pitting a British Empire team against the United States. The stadium had staged an Olympic Games itself in 1908 and was infamous for setting the official marathon distance at 26 miles, 385 yards (instead of simply 26 miles) so that the race would finish in front of Queen Alexandra’s royal box. The stadium was now used for greyhound racing and an assortment of other events, including athletics. The Americans beat the British Empire team, as they had beaten the world a few short days before.

      In the four-mile relay, where four runners from each team ran a mile, Roger Bannister earned the Empire team an early lead. But the second member of his team lost this advantage. Running third leg for the Americans, Wes Santee threatened to stretch out a lead for his team too great to overcome, but John Landy, running in the same leg for the Empire team, managed to close on Santee in the final 440. The anchors for each team traded leads, but in the end the Americans won. It was the first time Bannister, Santee, and Landy had competed in the same race. None of the three remembered much of the other, not a conversation, nor an impression of one another’s abilities. Yet as these three milers went their separate ways – Bannister back to life at St Mary’s Hospital, a short distance away by Tube, and Landy and Santee on long flights to their respective countries – each charted a course in the days ahead that would bring them back together again. It would be a struggle they and tens of millions would never forget.

      Santee flew back with an American team flush with victory. Although the Soviets had fought well in their events and had, for a few days, looked like they might actually win the most medals, they hadn’t been able to match the strength of the United States track and field team, which won fourteen gold and thirteen silver and bronze. Among his team-mates, Santee was in the minority of those who did not medal. Watching the 1,500m final, knowing he had beaten the second-place finisher Bob McMillen ‘every time we had stepped on a track’, left him feeling empty and as helpless as a puppet. He was certain he could have won the race had he been given the chance the amateur officials СКАЧАТЬ