The Perfect Mile

To test himself against Cummings, George was forced to forfeit his amateur status, despite having offered his earnings from the races to a hospital charity. After a series of preliminary races where both had a share of the victories, on 23 August 1886 Cummings and George faced off for the ‘Mile of the Century’. Twenty-five thousand spectators crowded around a bicycle track to watch George run so fast that he left Cummings unconscious behind him on the last lap. His record of 4:12.8 lasted for three decades and set the stage for Paavo Nurmi to introduce the four-minute mile to the world, establishing an irresistible challenge to athletes that would guarantee their place in history.

It is impossible to know who first uttered the challenge of running the mile in less than four minutes. Reports date back to 1770 of an English runner who made the distance from Charter House Wall to Shoreditch Church in the City of London in this time, but even nineteenth-century historians raised a sceptical eye to the account. In 1915, when American Norman Taber broke George’s record by less than two-tenths of a second, the athletics world was not set on fire. It was too slim a difference to warrant much more than a passing remark in the record books. Then, on 23 August 1923, 26-year-old farm engineer Paavo Nurmi from Turku in Finland was drawn into a faster first lap than he would have liked by Swedish miler Edvin Wide. Nurmi, who always ran with a large stopwatch in his hand and preferred an even-paced race, kept up with Wide’s fast start. By the third lap Wide had faded, but Nurmi continued the pace. He broke Taber’s record by two seconds with a 4:10.4. It was a giant step forward, given how long it had taken Taber to reduce Walter George’s mark by just a fraction of a second. Suddenly the mile record was in play again, and when, at the 1924 Paris Olympics, Nurmi won gold medals in the 1,500m and 5,000m in the space of forty-two minutes, he looked capable of anything. Joseph Binks, a noted journalist and former British miler, suggested to Nurmi that the mile barrier was within grasp. Nurmi replied, ‘No. Four minutes four seconds, maybe!’ Self-deprecation or not, the Finnish miler had put the possibility of a four-minute mile on the table.

Inspired by Nurmi, a new wave of talented milers appeared in the 1930s, and their races packed stadiums around the world. Races at Madison Square Garden rivalled modern-day prize fights. The air was dense with smoke, the crowds rowdy and devoted to their favourite runners, and the stands so close to the track that fans felt the rush of air when the field surged past. The first miler to run four minutes and single digits was Frenchman Jules Ladoumegue. An orphan who first ran in village-to-village races, Ladoumegue competed on pure emotion. Before races he was so agitated that he had to be pulled to the starting line. If a door closed suddenly behind him, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Once running, though, he loved the heat of battle and became a national treasure for his efforts. On 4 October 1931 he took advantage of a windless, sunny Parisian afternoon and the pacemaking of half-miler Rene Morel to reduce the mile record to 4:09.2.

Jack Lovelock, the New Zealand-born but British-adopted miler with a compact frame and keen idea of his abilities and limitations, was the next to lower the record. In his youth he had developed his smooth running style by striding alongside a stone wall while a friend on the opposite side chastised him whenever he saw his head moving up or down. On 15 July 1933 in Princeton, New Jersey, he ran a 4:07.6 while representing Oxford University against the Americans. After the race, the New York Herald Tribune praised, ‘It was all so easily accomplished, with so little outward evidence of stress and strain, as to make a four-minute mile seem just around the corner.’ Lovelock never reduced this time, but his Olympic gold medal in the 1,500m, his epic races against Glenn Cunningham and Sydney Wooderson, and his insight about training and tactics added to his legacy.

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:

Date Runner Place Time 1 January 1942 Haegg Gothenburg, Sweden 4:06.2 7 October 1942 Andersson Stockholm, Sweden 4:06.2 9 April 1942 Haegg Stockholm, Sweden 4:04.6 1 January 1943 Andersson Gothenburg, Sweden 4:02.6 18 July 1944 Andersson Malmö, Sweden 4:01.6 17 July 1945 Haegg Malmö, Sweden 4:01.4

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 had stolen from him in Los Angeles.

Before heading back to the University of Kansas, Santee went to visit his parents in Ashland for the first time since he had ridden away on that unnamed horse. If he was waiting for his father to say how proud he was of his son, Wes left empty-handed. Either his father simply didn’t understand what he had accomplished through his running, or the man just couldn’t express any feeling other than bitterness. Either way his silence stung. Over the past two years he had tried to convince his mother to leave his father, but she told Wes that since he had left his father had mended his ‘negative ways and stopped being so mean’. Regardless, Wes wanted nothing to do with the man.

Back in Lawrence, Santee sat down with Coach Easton, who did express his pride in Wes. Easton suggested he could learn a great deal from his Olympic experience, but Santee was less philosophical. It was not in his nature to suffer defeat. In his high school senior year he had lost the mile race in the state finals to Bill Tidwell. Although expected to win, particularly since he had in his sophomore and junior years, Santee had refused to be crestfallen. His close friend Don Humphreys had been surprised at his indifference. ‘I couldn’t understand how you could be up after losing the mile by a stride or two,’ he’d remarked to Wes. ‘I know Tidwell was a good distance runner, but it never occurred to me that he could beat you.’ Santee had explained in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Oh, Tidwell, he’s not a miler.’ It took a while for Humphrey to understand this response. Then he thought of a football player who gets knocked down in a game and gets right back up and sets out to return the favour. Santee had that killer instinct. As Humphreys later said, ‘Guys like that never get whipped in their minds. Even when they get beat, they’re not beat.’

In Helsinki, Santee felt he had learned how to fend for himself and compete against the best. He wanted to prove what a big mistake it had been to prevent him from running in the 1,500m; more importantly, he also wanted to show how good he really was. He set his sights on a goal that had always been on the horizon for him: the four-minute mile. In the list of high-school prophecies published when he graduated was the following: ‘Wesley Santee has recently broke the world mile record in a time of 3 min., 58.3 sec. And it should stand for many years to come.’ Since his win at the Drake Relays the previous spring, the prediction by sportswriters that he was a sure bet for the world mile record had brought the goal closer in sight. His blistering three-quarter-mile run in New York before leaving for the Olympics had made him realise just how close. Only days after returning to campus, Santee marched into the office of the University of Kansas newspaper. He had an announcement to make: Wes Santee was going to be the first to run the four-minute mile. For years he had known he was capable. Now his intention was a matter of public record.

John Landy had a different announcement to make when he landed in Melbourne, but one just as telling. Directly after the British Empire versus United States match, he had boarded a flight to Australia. He had declined to join Macmillan and Perry, who, accompanied by Cerutty, were running in a series of competitions in Scandinavia. Landy needed to get back to his agricultural science studies, which had fallen by the wayside as a result of his efforts to make the Olympic team. And he wanted to start training again. Landy was determined to show that his trip to Helsinki had been worth the time and money it had taken to get him there. This desire to redress his failure to qualify in either of his events, a failure that had been met with what he believed was unwarranted criticism, was also woven into his excitement about the prospect of becoming a faster and stronger runner. He felt he had been given the lessons now – in terms of improving his stride and training methods – to reach this new level. Zatopek and other European middle-distance runners had shown him how.

For his stride, he would be helped by a pair of European track shoes he had bought. Landy wanted nothing more to do with the kangaroo-hide track shoes made in Melbourne, which were designed primarily for sprinting on grass tracks. Therefore, the spikes were built up in the front, so much so that it was awkward to lower the heel of the foot to the ground. They required him to run on his toes. In Helsinki, Landy noticed that the European middle-distancers ran in spikes with flat soles and a heel, and they had a smoother, more relaxed stride. But shoes alone would not change his running style; he would also have to practise the arm and leg action of the Europeans until it became habit.

But, as Zatopek had shown, style was not what separated the Czech from every other distance runner in the world. It was his demanding training, and Landy felt that if achieving fast mile times was mostly a question of working hard, he was willing to make the sacrifice. On the flight back to Australia, he spent many hours rehashing in his notebook the type of training sessions Zatopek had discussed with him and other runners, concocting a plan to achieve for himself the kind of fitness Zatopek had revealed in Helsinki. By doing so, he hoped to beat Don Macmillan’s national record in the mile – 4:08.9 – and win the Australian championship in early 1953.

When Landy arrived at Melbourne’s airport, journalists herded around the athletes asking for their comments on the Olympics and on the future. Some complained of having travelled too far with too little rest; others denied that they were ready to retire; many defended their achievements or lack thereof. Landy spoke of Emil Zatopek. He explained how the Czech had proved his superiority, earning three gold medals. ‘He thoroughly deserved his success because he is the hardest trained athlete in the world,’ Landy said. It was obvious to those who knew the young Australian miler that he meant to claim this distinction for himself. Though his goals had nothing yet to do with a four-minute barrier, unwittingly they had set him on its path, and he would soon show that nothing was safe from his determination.

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