on your marks, get set…
I read a cracking interview the other day where Roger Bannister was asked about the highlights of his life. Somewhat surprisingly, he listed his achievement of the first sub-four minute mile way down the pecking order, under many things which perhaps the majority of us would potentially regard as being relatively ordinary and mundane. On registering the surprise on the interviewer’s face Sir Roger then went on to provide some context around the record-breaking adventure.
The attempt had taken place in 1954 at the relatively unknown track of Iffley Road in Oxford, where the 25 year old was training as a junior doctor. As such, he was only able to train for the race for 45 minutes a day, had spent the morning doing his usual ward rounds and sharpened his racing spikes in the hospital lab. Indeed, had there been an unexpected emergency, he would have not even made the race! If anything, Roger now comes across a little ambivalent, or even a tad peeved by the whole brouhaha surrounding the record stating “I thought all the fuss might last a day, or a week, or a month but it’s gone on for years.” And it shows no sign of abating.
Contrast this sharply to today’s pampered and cosseted athletes all set to compete in the largest sporting charade the world will have ever seen, where all see themselves as a worldwide ‘brand’ with an earning potential to be maximised at all costs. The last word surely has to go to the great man himself: “If I’d had to give something up, it would have always have been running, never medicine. Medicine was my life.”
