“A brick wall,” Landy called the four-minute mark. His great rival, the Australian John Landy, had also been trying for the record, and washed his hands of it just a month earlier. He was 25, ready to relinquish his athletic efforts and devote his time to the medical profession. ![]() Having failed previous attempts to run a mile in under four minutes, Bannister was preparing to retire. ![]() We know this because of Roger Bannister.īannister’s four-minute mile on a windy May evening in 1954 is probably the most famous story in track history after Pheidippides. We know that once this is accomplished, the dam will break and more men and women will be running two-hour marathons than we can even dream of on this day, in March 2018. We know, or can be reasonably certain, that it will be accomplished in a matter of years. Here looking at a glass plate negative of a photo of him crossing the finishing line in his at the time record breaking sub four minute mile.Passing the sportswear ads on Carter Road, I smiled to myself thinking of the distance between my clownish stumbling and the elite runners currently testing the limits of human endurance, as Nike and Adidas work overtime to find and train champions who can run a marathon in two hours. Read the whole story on Photo Archive News: Sir Roger Bannister at home in Oxford. Indeed, preserving a photographic archive is not only about keeping trace of the past, but also fostering new reuse of unique historical content, and the creation of new contemporary content. After seeing the article, Sir Roger Bannister himself contacted the Times, and Michael-John and the photographer Jack Hill were invited to visit him, for showing the original plates and for an interview and a very nice new photo shoot. Understanding their storytelling potential, the whole set of negatives was immediately digitized and reused in a celebration article published later on the Times. The Times photographer did a remarkable job capturing the race, in particular the finish line image, as most other photographers and reporters had been placed on the inside of the Oxford track: the photographer William Horton however was on the track itself, looking straight down the lens at Roger as he crossed the tape. As it was typical of the time, photographs were not often used in broadsheets but this picture, seen now together with the other seven photographs, illustrate perfectly a moment in history. ![]() ![]() In facts, in 2014 he was able to retrieve in the archive the original set of negatives of the photo taken that day, including the full un-cropped version of the published image. The original Times coverage of that day had published a very famous cropped shot of Bannister exhausted crossing the finish line but there is a nice follow-up story, recently published on Photo Archive News magazine and told by Michael-John Jennings, the Picture Librarian at the Times (News Licensing) photo archive. When the announcer, Norris McWhirter, declared “The time was three…”, the cheers of the crowd drowned out Bannister’s exact time, which was 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. This strengthened his resolve to be the first 4-minute miler, and he achieved this feat on at Iffley Road track in Oxford. He is a true celebrity in the UK: in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Bannister set a British record in the 1500 metres and finished fourth. Recently passed at the age of 89, Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister was a British middle-distance athlete, doctor and academic who ran the first sub-4-minute mile. Images: News UK Archives via Photo Archive News.
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