Roger Bannister feat shows history forgets those who run second

ON the anniversary of Roger Bannister's legendary landmark, we recall those who missed out.

History forgets those who run second

SIXTY years ago this week Roger Bannister became the first man to break the four-minute mile barrier and conquer the flat-track Everest. Forty-six days later Australia’s John Landy ran even faster and history barely noticed. Here we celebrate the nearly ­heroes who were second to some of sport’s great landmarks.

John Landy and the Four-Minute Mile

Ask the layman if he has heard of John Landy and you may get a quizzical look, but many believe the Australian is the man who truly deserved the accolades, the documentaries and the birthday bashes.

Bannister told The Times that he believed Landy would have broken the four-minute barrier first had he used pacemakers. So why didn’t he? “I didn’t want to be part of something questionable, which is how pacesetting was seen at the time,” Landy explained. Criticism of Bannister’s “schemed” time-trial, with Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway clearly acting as pacemakers but being forced to say afterwards that they had been trying to win, festered throughout May 1954.

There was even a debate about whether the world record would even be ratified due to the uncompetitive nature of the race at Iffley Road, Oxford. “I wanted to run the four-minute mile by myself,” Landy, now 84, said years later.

Landy broke Bannister’s record in a race in Finland on June 21, 1954. Bannister believes ­Chataway’s presence in that race was also pivotal.

“Landy had run five four-minute two-second races and said it was like a brick wall,” he said. “I can assure you from my medical knowledge that it was not a brick wall. The situation was one had to find something extra and John Landy did not have a pacemaker. The missing factor for him was competition, somebody he was frightened of. So he looked over his shoulder and saw Chataway. And he took off.”

Landy clocked 3min 58sec, destroying Bannister’s mark but the Englishman gained revenge at the 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver. Bannister has said defeating Landy, in what would become known as the “Miracle Mile”, was a greater achievement than breaking the four-minute barrier.

“I think that racing in the Olympics and Commonwealths is more important than breaking records,” Bannister said, with the current mile world record held by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj in a time of 3:43.13sec.

“Vancouver was the pinnacle of my athletics career. It is very difficult to break records during Olympic competition, but ­winning races was better than holding world records.”

Landy led for most of the race, but Bannister overtook him on the final bend, when the Australian looked round to check his position.

“The race between the two of us was a very, very special race,” Bannister said.

“It determined which would be regarded as the superior runner in history, not the sub four minutes, but the head-to-head nature of the race in Vancouver.

“He was the favourite by then and he was probably a stronger runner, but I had a stronger finish.

“I just had to hang on as much as I could when he was trying to run me off my feet, but I managed to hang on and overtake him.

“I had to overtake him on the bend and I knew the only place he could look and see if he had dropped me was on the last corner, so I left it so we were just at the edge and, fortuitously, he looked over his shoulder and I overtook him.”

A bronze sculpture of the ­moment Landy glanced round now stands outside the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver, having been moved following the demolition of the Empire ­Stadium.

Landy once joked: “While Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back, I am probably the only one ever turned into bronze for looking back.” Few outside of Australia know Landy’s name.

In Australia he is best remembered for something else entirely. Two years later, already being touted as the face of the Olympic Games in his home town of Melbourne, he doubled back during the 1500m at the Australian National Championships to check on Ron Clarke, a runner who had fallen. Landy explained that he had caught Clarke’s arm with his spikes as he fell. “Sorry,” he said as he helped him up, whereupon he rejoined the race and won in 4min 4.2sec. A statue of the incident stands in Melbourne’s Olympic Park.

Landy later became governor of Victoria and has never been bitter about Bannister’s triumph.

While admitting the barrier became an obsession, he refused to be drawn into the controversy over its validity.

“The four-minute mile had been run,” he said bluntly.

Nellie Kim and the Perfect Ten

The perfect 10 in gymnastics was another near-mythical barrier. In 1976 in Montreal, Nadia Comaneci, of Romania, became the first gymnast to achieve it at an Olympic Games. The scoreboard, incapable of catering for four digits flashed up “1.00”. “I thought I did better than a one,” Comaneci later recalled. The 14-year-old left Montreal with seven perfect 10s.

Nellie Kim, of the Soviet Union, also achieved perfection at the same Olympics, but for the media she was second best.

Later, as president of the sport’s technical committee, Kim helped to introduce a scoring ­system that saw the end of the perfect 10. Comaneci later said this had complicated the sport and alienated fans.

Larry Doby and the Colour Line

Jackie Robinson is a legend in the US. As the first black man to play Major League baseball, in 1947, he suffered widespread racism, as ­shown in the Hollywood film 42. The same went for Doby, who became the second black man to play Major League baseball that same summer.

In the US there is now a Jackie Robinson Day and Time magazine has hailed him as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

When Robinson’s shirt number was retired in 1997, Doby was widely ignored by the media, a teammate likening him to Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. Doby and Robinson spoke often during the tumultuous 1947 season as they integrated a ­national passion.

Doby later served as a pallbearer at Robinson’s funeral.

Ravi Shastri hits
Six Sixes

Garfield Sobers may have claimed that “six sixes are not good cricket” but one over against Glamorgan in 1968 still captures the imagination.

The scale of the romance was shown by the sale of the ball in question for £26,400 in 2006, and the subsequent row about provenance. Those who remember Ravi Shastri matching Sobers’ achievement in a domestic match in India, some 17 years later, are rarer, albeit Tilak Raj, the hapless bowler, said people at home would “jeer at me and humiliate me” for a year afterwards.

The Times, AFP