Kickstarter BANNISTER: Documentary on 4-Minute Mile

Bannister proved that CrossFit style sprint repeats work. He basically did their HIIT workouts day in day out during his lunch break. You don't need to run 100+ miles per week.

Doesn't seem like something that needs kickstarter help.

Looks cool. I signed up.

Last time I did one of these was for Ryan Hall. Still no word of anything on that.

Hopeful Runner wrote:

Last time I did one of these was for Ryan Hall. Still no word of anything on that.

Supposedly still being filmed-

The Hall film is a project of one guy - Tim Jeffreys.

The Bannister film is being done by Kimbia athletics which is a reputable bunch -

The 4 minute mile is the biggest propaganda lie in all athletics.

Nobody thought it was impossible. Hägg would have had it years earlier if he hadn't been banned as a pro. But more importantly, nobody thought it was a really big deal, until the PR blitz for Bannister convinced an ignorant, gullible public that it was.

Where were all the 50th-anniversary documentaries of the sub-10 FAT 100m? That should be at least as big a deal as the 4 minute mile, particularly since it was not an obsolete event when it happened. The mile had long been replaced by the 1500 and was run, then as now, just for old times' sake. It was big in exactly the same way the "8-foot high jump" and "20-foot pole vault" were big to people who had yet to hear of the IAAF's switch to metric-only decades earlier.

I've just hand-timed Bannister at 1:30.9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz3ZLpCmKCM

Bad Wigins wrote:The 4 minute mile is the biggest propaganda lie in all athletics.

Nobody thought it was impossible.

That's actually not true.

Brutus Hamilton, the famous track coach at Kansas and Cal and for the US Olympic team, wrote a paper in 1935 called "The Ultimate of Human Effort" in Amateur Athlete where he tried to predict the fastest 100m possible, the longest javelin throw, etc. For the mile Hamilton predicted the fastest humanly possible time was 4:01.6.

SDFASTGUY wrote:

This looks like a good documentary on a subject we probably all think we know. Can't wait to hear the story from the people who were actually there.

Here's the link to watch the trailer or contribute to the kickstarter campaign.

http://kck.st/1pBl2yQ

BANNISTER: Documentary on 60th Anniversary of 4-Minute Mile

We approve this message! No other track & field event has had a Roger Bannister Moment that was HUGE at the time and still resonates to this day, along with the sub-4 minute Mile standard, in the sport, and moreover, beyond.

Member of the production team here, writing in:

A little history for you wrote:

Brutus Hamilton, the famous track coach at Kansas and Cal and for the US Olympic team, wrote a paper in 1935 called "The Ultimate of Human Effort" in Amateur Athlete where he tried to predict the fastest 100m possible, the longest javelin throw, etc. For the mile Hamilton predicted the fastest humanly possible time was 4:01.6.

Yes! We even managed to track down headlines referencing Brutus Hamilton's prediction (among others) to include in the movie.

Bad Wigins wrote:

Nobody thought it was impossible. Hägg would have had it years earlier if he hadn't been banned as a pro. But more importantly, nobody thought it was a really big deal, until the PR blitz for Bannister convinced an ignorant, gullible public that it was.

I actually agree that the "impossibility" of the task seems a little overblown, and we try to offer context in the doc. We include John Landy saying point-blank that if not for World War II, the four-minute-mile might have been run years earlier. But when a decade passes without the record being lowered even a tenth, it invites very real questions of if/when the record could be broken again. Because the Swedes were so close, many papers wrote that it was theirs for the taking... so then, when they didn't do it -- for whatever reason -- what were people left to think, rightly or wrongly?

The four minute mile had a lot going for it, in terms of interest and hype: speculation about whether it was physically possible, the perfect symmetry of the record, and a chase that involved three very different personalities on three different continents... plus a post-war Great Britain that was hungry for any sort of good news. Pretty much the perfect storm for generating interest.

We make sure to touch each of these angles in BANNISTER, and hope we can offer the fullest picture possible with our film. It's really exciting to see that people are as interested in this story as we are.

I did not sign up. Its a scam as far as I can see.

Bad Wigins wrote:

The 4 minute mile is the biggest propaganda lie in all athletics.

Nobody thought it was impossible. Hägg would have had it years earlier if he hadn't been banned as a pro. But more importantly, nobody thought it was a really big deal, until the PR blitz for Bannister convinced an ignorant, gullible public that it was.

Where were all the 50th-anniversary documentaries of the sub-10 FAT 100m? That should be at least as big a deal as the 4 minute mile, particularly since it was not an obsolete event when it happened. The mile had long been replaced by the 1500 and was run, then as now, just for old times' sake. It was big in exactly the same way the "8-foot high jump" and "20-foot pole vault" were big to people who had yet to hear of the IAAF's switch to metric-only decades earlier.

idiot, no

we've been thru this

you have no credibility

Hopeful Runner wrote:

Last time I did one of these was for Ryan Hall. Still no word of anything on that.

It's still going. No joke.

Xfit_guy_the_real_1 wrote:

Bannister proved that CrossFit style sprint repeats work. He basically did their HIIT workouts day in day out during his lunch break. You don't need to run 100+ miles per week.

What on Earth are you blabbering about now?

No miler runs 100+ miles per week to begin with.

micromist wrote:

Doesn't seem like something that needs kickstarter help.

what does? kickstarter is money transfer from gullible suckers to others.

You are basically bootstrapping someone else's company in return for ZERO equity! Donating on kickstarter to a for-profit makes you a sucker! There's one born every minute.

The trailer looks good, the Kimbia folks have some credibility, and I'm a sucker for the romance of the mile.

I'm in at the $65 level.

Good luck, guys!

Didn't Bannister take Zumba classes too?

the truth hurts wrote:what does? kickstarter is money transfer from gullible suckers to others.

You are basically bootstrapping someone else's company in return for ZERO equity! Donating on kickstarter to a for-profit makes you a sucker! There's one born every minute.

That would make a little sense if you were talking about a Kickstarter for developing some commercial product, although good luck getting any meaningful equity in a startup business for $25 or $50.

In this case, nobody wants equity in a movie about Roger Bannister. It's not the next "Star Wars" and you would never see a return on your investment. Instead, if you want to see a good documentary about Bannister, you pay into Kickstarter and if it works you get a DVD. You get to feel good about preserving a bit of history and maybe getting the word out to another generation about track and field. That makes a lot more sense than getting equity in the project.

Bannister showed what can be achieved with the use of amphetamines.