Sport: Glory on Foot

There is no greater glory for a man as long as he lives than that which he wins by his own hands and feet.

—Homer, The Odyssey

When Henry Ford first put his model T on the road in 1908 and ushered in the motor age, the track record for the mile stood at 4:15.6, the record for the shotput at 49 ft. 10 in. And that, the doom-criers felt, was about as fast as a man would manage to run and as far as he would throw the iron ball—in an age when the machine was taking over the work of human muscles. Yet somehow, man's glory of achievement "by his own hands and feet," which the Greeks extolled in their great games, continued to grow. Steadily, by split seconds and fractions of inches, athletes pushed themselves toward greater and greater performance. Last week brought two records beyond the wildest dreams of the model-T age.

In California, 22-year-old Champion Parry O'Brien smashed his own shotput world record (59 ft. 2¼in.), and crossed the long-standing 60-ft. barrier: with a mighty heave, he hurled the 16-lb. iron ball 60 ft. 5¼ in., a distance long believed to be unattainable. Only two days earlier, an even more "unattainable" record was set: the four-minute mile, long dreamed of by runners, was finally achieved by a shy, gangling British medical student named Roger Bannister.

The Goal. Athletes became really serious about the four-minute mile in 1923, when Finland's famed Paavo Nurmi clocked 4:10.4. Slowly the figure shrank. In 1945, Sweden's Gunder ("The Wonder") Hägg ran a breathtaking 4:01.4, the world record till last week.

By 1947, Roger Bannister, then 17, was an undergraduate at Oxford. In the winter months, he proved an excellent snow shoveler, and as a reward for that distinction—not because anyone thought that he could really run—Bannister got a place as a third-string miler in the annual Oxford-Cambridge track match. He won the race with a dull but respectable 4:30.8. By 1950, carefully studying his stride, his pulse rate (a low 50), his oxygen intake (a high 5 liters) and his diet. Medical Student Bannister had reduced his time to 4:09.9. He had a good light-limbed build for running (6 ft. 1½ in., 154 lbs.). In the 1952 Olympics, Bannister was a well-beaten fourth. But last year, he ran an eye-opening 4:03.6, then ran a specially paced 4:02.

Meanwhile, he could feel the hot breath of Australia's John Landy (4:02) and the U.S.'s Wes Santee (4:03.4). When self-taught Miler Bannister met Austrian Coach Franz Stampfl last November, he agreed for the first time to take some coaching. Stampfl set Bannister to work on arm and leg calisthenics and mountain climbing, taught him to pace himself precisely. A month ago, Bannister went to work in earnest, started off running seven consecutive half miles at a 2:03 pace.

The Race. In the train from London to Oxford last week, Roger Bannister was not at all sure that he wanted to run that day. It was raining and the wind was stiff. Never mind the weather, urged Coach Stampfl: it might actually challenge him to greater effort. "It got down to a discussion of what was bad weather," Stampfl recalled later. "Then we discussed how much was physical and how much was psychological motivation. We ended up talking about supernatural experiences."