Sixty years on from the day Sir Roger changed athletics

Sixty years on from the day Sir Roger changed athletics

9:30am Tuesday 6th May 2014 in News

Sir Roger Bannister will listen to todays tributes with his usual cheerfulness, happy to recount again the story of that day: how he had gone to the London hospital where he worked, sharp-ened his spikes in the laboratory before travelling to Oxford, ever fearful that the strong winds would ruin everything.

Oxford Universitys vice-chancellor Lord Patten will attend, along with college heads, university luminaries and Sir Rogers family and friends to remember the events of May 6, 1954.

That was the day the most iconic barrier in world sport was finally broken, when Sir Roger became the first human being to run a mile in under four minutes, crossing the line to enter sporting immortality.

For all his subsequent achievements as a distinguished neurologist and Master of Pembroke College, he has never resented the determination of his countryman to lock him in a moment of time burned into the nations consciousness. For three years now he has been suffering from Parkinsons Disease. A head-on crash in 1975, when his ankle was crushed, stopped him from ever being able to run again.

He would never stop trying, wearing orthopaedic supports, soft shoes, always on soft grass: he was still experimenting with Kenyan Masai-type shoes well into his sixties, always to be disappointed.

Now at the age of 85, Parkinsons Disease makes walking difficult, although his mind remains as sharp as ever.

I still have a walking group of 11 good friends. They go for a walk every month but these days I only go for the pub lunch afterwards, he chuckled, when we met at his North Oxford home. Decades of neurological training, clinical work and research at the National Hospital and St Marys Hospital in London made him an expert on Parkinsons many years before he was himself diagnosed with the disease.

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Sixty years on from the day Sir Roger changed athletics