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- The_Perfect_Mile abstract "The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It (2004) by Neal Bascomb is a non-fiction book about three runners and their attempts to become the first man to run a mile under four minutes. The runners are Englishman Roger Bannister, American Wes Santee, and Australian John Landy. The book's climax is Bannister's breaking of the record on May 6, 1954.There was a time when running the mile in four minutes was believed to be beyond the limits of human foot speed, and in all of sport it was the elusive holy grail. In 1952, after suffering defeat at the Helsinki Olympics, three world-class runners each set out to break this barrier. Roger Bannister was a young English medical student who epitomized the ideal of the amateur — still driven not just by winning but by the nobility of the pursuit. John Landy was the privileged son of a genteel Australian family, who as a boy preferred butterfly collecting to running but who trained relentlessly in an almost spiritual attempt to shape his body to this singular task. Then there was Wes Santee, the swaggering American, a Kansas farm boy and natural athlete who believed he was just plain better than everybody else.Spanning three continents and defying the odds, their collective quest captivated the world and stole headlines from the Korean War, the atomic race, and such legendary figures as Edmund Hillary, Willie Mays, Native Dancer, and Ben Hogan. In the tradition of Seabiscuit and Chariots of Fire, Neal Bascomb delivers a breathtaking story of unlikely heroes and leaves us with a lasting portrait of the twilight years of the golden age of sport.By now, most are aware that May 6 will mark the 60th anniversary of history’s first sub four-minute mile. On that date in 1954, a young English medical student named Roger Bannister achieved what many felt to be beyond the limits of human performance, as he sped four laps at the Iffley track in Oxford in three minutes, 59, and four-tenths seconds. Bannister’s mile was the most significant and perhaps greatest running achievement of the 20th century. Certainly it is history’s most remembered and celebrated run, with the possible exception of the trek by Phidippides in ancient Greece, which led to the modern-day marathon.Like most landmark historical moments however, there was much more to Bannister’s run than what took place on May 6, 1954. Providing the historical backdrop that led to the history-making moment is what elevates The Perfect Mile. Author Neal Bascomb transports the reader back to the early 1950s, when in post-war society the world seemed full of promise, especially in the realm of athletics. The color barrier was broken in professional baseball and mountaineers were closing in on the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest. In addition, three top middle distance runners from points distant on the globe had their sights set on the world record in the mile, 4:01.4 by Sweden’s Gundar Haegg, a mark that had stood for the better part of a decade.The Perfect Mile sets the stage, offering the reader insight into the hopes and dreams of those three athletes: Australian John Landy, American Wes Santee, and the Brit Bannister. As with most watershed moments in athletics, the euphoria of triumph for one meant bitter disappointment for others. The later fate befell both Landy and Santee, who felt for certain the first sub four-minute mile would be theirs to capture. Both had numerous chances—as did Bannister—before history was made in May 1954. In many ways however, during the buildup to the record it seemed as if Bannister had fate on his side. At that moment in history, Britain was still considered the world’s cultural center, destined to create and shape history. Indeed, New Zealander and fellow member of the British Empire Edmund Hillary had become the first to conquer Everest just a year earlier.One pleasantly surprising aspect of The Perfect Mile is that it does not conclude with the first sub four-minute mile—far from it. The book follows the three men in the months thereafter, during which many more interesting developments ensue. One of those occurs just weeks later, when Landy improves Bannister’s record by nearly two seconds, to 3:58:00. That performance validates Landy’s feeling that he is indeed the superior runner and should have run history’s first sub-four himself, had a little more luck been on his side. For Bannister, Landy’s quick improvement of the record is unsettling, leaving him with the feeling that history will forget it was actually he that ran the first sub four-minute mile. Of course, we know now that Bannsiter’s place in history was cemented on that day in Oxford, and that it was Landy who became a historical footnote.The rivalry between Bannister and Landy reached its greatest heights however (Santee had joined the service and for most part given up the sport), in the months following Bannister’s 3:59:4 and Landy’s 3:58:00. The Empire Games in 1954 proved to be the setting that would determine—at least in the minds of the two runners—who was truly the greatest miler of that era. Although The Perfect Mile paints a rich portrait of the personalities involved in pursuit of history’s first sub four-minute mile, the reader knows how that turned out before beginning the book. Thus, for those who are not experts in running history, the later part of the book pulls the reader in even further, as it builds tension and suspense toward the day in Vancouver when the pair would once and for all settle their rivalry.The Perfect Mile not only recounts one of history’s greatest athletic achievements, it recalls a bygone and in many ways forgotten era in running, a time when science and technology played insignificant roles in performance, and perhaps more importantly, when motivation was not fueled by financial reward. Rather, greatness was forged purely by the strength of individual guts and will, the simple desire to excel. No great achievement is created in a vacuum however, a fact well detailed in The Perfect Mile. The name Roger Bannister is etched in history, but only with help from his friends and rivals. How that came to be is more than enough reason to read the Perfect Mile.May 6, 1954 didn't look like a day to break records. There were gale-force winds and squally showers, and Roger Bannister's attempt to run a mile in under four minutes seemed certain to be called off. He went through the motions nonetheless, sharpening his spikes in the hospital lab where he was training as a doctor, then catching the train from Paddington to Oxford. The crowd at the Iffley Road cinder track was modest - only 1,200 or so, though 20,000 or more would later claim to have been there.Fifteen minutes before the race, the wind was still gusting. But then the clouds lifted, a rainbow appeared, the St George's flag on the nearby church tower fell slack, and Bannister decided to go for it.The rest is history. By the time he left a Carnaby Street club at dawn next morning, after a night of champagne and dancing, Bannister was a national icon. "The empire is saved," one newspaper wrote. "There's been nothing to compare with this since the destruction of the Spanish Armada." Less hyperbolic reports linked it to Hillary's scaling of Everest and the young Queen Elizabeth's coronation (both the previous year). A spirit of post-war confidence was born. Was there no limit to what man could do? Next thing we'd be landing on the moon.It took enormous dedication, intelligence, luck and guts for Bannister to achieve his ambition, as these 50th-anniversary books, along with his own account, The First Four Minutes (Sutton Publishing, £7.99), make clear. It also took other people - not just friends, family and coaches, but the active involvement of two key athletes. The dust jacket of John Bryant's book identifies them as Bannister's friends Christopher Chataway and Chris Brasher, who acted as his pacemakers. Less Anglocentrically, the back cover of Neal Bascomb's book credits Bannister's rivals, the Australian John Landy and American Wes Santee, who concentrated his efforts and either of whom might have beaten him to the record.The four-minute mile was a holy grail long before the 1950s. Many declared it impossible. Some said the penalty for attempting it would be death. A few claimed it had been done already - among them, as early as 1770, a costermonger who ran the length of London's Old Street. In 1886 Walter George and William Cummings took each other on in the "mile of the century" in front of a crowd of 30,000 in west London. The world-best time stood at 4:18 then. In winning, George brought it down to 4:12, a record that lasted three decades.The 20th century meant better tracks and more reliable stopwatches. The allure was, in part, the numerological sweetness: four laps, four quarter-miles, four minutes. In 1923, the Finn Paavo Nurmi ran 4:10; in 1937 the Briton Sydney Wooderson 4:06; between 1942 and 1945, the Swedes Gundar Haegg and Arne Andersson swapped records and lowered the bar to 4:01. With the rest of the world preoccupied by war, it seemed inevitable the record would go to a neutral Swede - and if a spent cartridge case from the starter's gun hadn't somehow jammed itself in Andersson's spikes during a race in Malmo, perhaps it would have. But when the dream mile was finally run, it wasn't by a Scandinavian, on a fast Scandinavian track, but by an English gentleman-amateur, in Oxford.The old-university ethos that produced Roger Bannister held training to be slightly vulgar. Coaches were scorned - to have fun and win with seeming effortlessness was the goal. "Oxford sprinter Bevil Rudd illustrated this," Bascomb writes, "when he arrived at a quarter-mile race with a lit cigar in his mouth, put it down on the track's edge, won the event in a record time, and picked up the still smoking cigar when finished."For years Bannister got by on half an hour's training a day. But he also scrupulously researched the physiological effects of running - using friends such as Norris McWhirter as guinea pigs on his treadmill - and gradually refined his fitness and tactics. By May 1954, he was perfectly prepared.Forty-six days after Bannister broke the four-minute barrier, Landy ran 3:58. In the meantime Santee missed out by half a second, the closest he ever got, though he too would surely have broken through had the US athletic authorities not persecuted and then banned him for allegedly breaching his amateur status. (The permissibility of taking money or gifts was a vexed area, and the injustice done to Santee and some of his peers by meddling bureaucrats is a whole story in itself.) The demand for a showdown became irresistible: running against the clock was all very well, but what about running against each other?In Vancouver, in August, at the Empire games (these days the Commonwealth games), Bannister and Landy finally went head to head. Landy's tactic, as always, was to go out early and hope to hang on - at one point he led by 15 yards. But Bannister ran the perfect race, kicking round the last bend and passing Landy on the home straight. Both men broke four minutes. Now no one could deny Bannister his crown.As with the races they describe, there is practically nothing to choose between these two books. Bascomb offers more stylistic flair, psychological penetration and narrative drama; Bryant (a lifelong athlete and coach) writes with deeper inside knowledge and offers the longer historical perspective. Both draw on extensive interviews and make the technical stuff - fartleks and lactate counts - accessible to the general reader.Today the mile has lost its glamour and 1,500m is seen as the more "natural" distance: we're all metric now. Britain's lack of middle-distance runners since the era of Coe, Ovett and Cram has hastened the decline. In the rare instances that miles are run, Africans dominate. In 1999, Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj ran 3:43 - Bannister would have trailed a quarter-lap behind. By the time 3:30 is achievable, the event may be dead as the 4 x 1mile relay. The idling flag on the Iffley Road church, and the pipe-smoking men in overcoats watching Bannister breast the tape, are already part of a lost era.Review-A-Day"In the extraordinary tale of three long-distance runners who sought to break the four-minute-mile, Neal Bascomb constructs a narrative that's so exhaustively researched it reads like a piece of detective work....Bascomb has written a tremendously absorbing human drama that will put you in awe of these men, and leave you longing for the pre-steroids era, when resolve and steely will were all that mattered." Adrienne Miller, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:There was a time when running the mile in four minutes was the elusive holy grail, believed to be beyond the limits of human speed. In 1952, after suffering defeat at the Helsinki Olympics, three world-class runners set out individually to break that barrier. Roger Bannister was a young English medical student who epitomized the ideal of the amateur — driven not just by winning but by the nobility of the pursuit. John Landy was the privileged son of a genteel Australian family, who as a boy preferred butterfly collecting to running but who trained relentlessly in an almost spiritual attempt to achieve this singular task. Then there was Wes Santee, the swaggering American, a Kansas farm boy who was a natural athlete and who believed he was just plain better than everybody else.Santee was the first to throw down the gauntlet in what would become a three-way race of body, heart, and soul. Each young man endured thousands of hours of training, bore the weight of his nation's expectations on his shoulders, and still dared to push his very limits. Their collective quest captivated the world and stole headlines from the Korean War, the atomic race, and such legendary figures as Edmund Hillary, Willie Mays, Native Dancer, and Ben Hogan. Who would be the first to achieve the unachievable? And who among them would be the best when they went head to head?In the tradition of Seabiscuit and Chariots of Fire, Neal Bascomb delivers a breathtaking story of unlikely heroes and leaves us with a lasting portrait of the twilight years of the golden age of sport.Review:"The attempt by three men in the 1950s to become the first to run the mile in less than four minutes is a classic 20th-century sports story. Bascomb's excellent account captures all of the human drama and competitive excitement of this legendary racing event. It helps that the story and its characters are so engaging to begin with. The three rivals span the globe: England's Roger Bannister, who combines the rigors of athletic training with the 'grueling life of a medical student'; Australia's John Landy, 'driven by a demand to push himself to the limit'; and Wes Santee from the U.S., a brilliant strategic runner who became the 'victim' of the '[h]ypocrisy and unchecked power' of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Although Bannister broke the record before Landy, Landy soon broke Bannister's record, and the climax of the book is a long and superb account of the race between the two men at the Empire Games in Vancouver on August 7, 1954. Bascomb provides the essential details of this 'Dream Race' — which was heard over the radio by 100 million people — while Santee, who may have been able to beat both of them, was forced by AAU restrictions to participate only as a broadcast announcer. Bascomb definitively shows how this perfect race not only was a 'defining moment in the history of the mile — and of sport as well,' but also how it reveals 'a sporting world in transition' from amateurism to professionalism. (Apr.) Forecast: With Bascomb's narrative skills, it's no surprise that movie rights have already been optioned — and by the team behind the Seabiscuit film." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)Review:"[A] rare literary win. In finding the right balance of humanity and a sense of immediacy along each training run and at every record attempt, Bascomb has penned a sports tribute book that transcends the genre." OregonianReview:"It was Bannister...who won the race to crack the four-minute wall. How he did so is a dramatic story, and Bascomb tells it well." Washington PostReview:"Where Bascomb's meticulous approach and evocative style pay dividends is in his sketching of the backgrounds of the three runners." New York TimesReview:"This is an engaging tale that features detailed notes for each chapter, plus...black-and-white photos." Library JournalSynopsis:In the tradition of Seabiscuit, Bascomb delivers a breathtaking story of unlikely heroes and leaves readers with a lasting portrait of the twilight years of the golden age of sport.Synopsis:For fans of The Perfect Mile and Born to Run, a riveting, three-pronged narrative about the golden era of running in America—the 1970s—as seen through the fascinating lives and careers of running greats, Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, and Alberto Salazar.The New York Times' review calls it an "enthralling book" and says Bascomb "expertly winds up the tension of the three men's many failed attempts to get closer to the magic mark, before Bannister wrote himself into legend first on a windy day at the Oxford University track".".
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