Roger Bannister leaves us now, track cinders flying behind him, gone to life but not to history. Long ago, he ran a mile in less than four minutes, in an era when this was considered impossible.
But how many still remember his name, much less his accomplishment?
On May 6, 1954, when some of us were alive and still young enough to be stirred by sports records, Bannister set an athletic mark comparable to Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs in baseball. He ran a mile in 3:59.4.
Sometimes, in the worst of Jones Falls Expressway rush-hour traffic, it’s tough enough merely to drive a mile in four minutes.
Bannister was 25, a medical student in London, and on a damp, raw afternoon after lunching with a few friends, in an effort described the next day by the New York Times as having reached “one of man’s hitherto unattainable goals,” Bannister broke the finish line tape at precisely the instant he’d reached utter exhaustion.
How important was the mark, and what was its impact on a generation? Here’s one measure: Six years after Bannister’s run, I was one of roughly 400 guys who went out for Baltimore City College’s track team. Think about that for a moment: 400 high school kids trying out for track! The mile was considered the sport’s glamour event, as so many of us were still under the spell of Bannister’s magic.
But here’s the other figure to consider: the best milers in town – and that included City’s champ, a fellow named Kenny Mason – were still struggling to run the mile in less than five minutes – a full minute slower than Bannister.
So the great Brit dies over the weekend, at 88, and leaves not only a world record (which in the ensuing 64 years has since been lowered to 3:43.13 by a Moroccan named Hicham El Guerrouj), but a reminder: What seems impossible sometimes isn’t.
That’s the real beauty of sports. In the aftermath of this winter’s Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, you can still hear the moaning over Americans’ failure to win more medals. Such sentiments miss the larger point. Ideally, the games aren’t supposed to match one nation against another. That’s just politics. The real purpose is to match each individual (or each team) against his or her own potential.
We want to know the ultimate capabilities possessed by the human body and spirit – whatever that human’s nationality. Roger Bannister’s death is a reminder of that overcast day in Great Britain 64 years ago, and a shining moment in sports history, when he showed the world that sometimes the seemingly impossible is actually achievable.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.