Was Roger Bannister the most talented miler of all-time?

No. No he wasn't.

blocked and reported

You're correct, I was mistaken. Pretty crazy how they had a steamroller go over the cinder track and used fire to dry up the track hours before the run. How the times have changed hey

Landy's first sub-4 (3:58.0, June 21, 1954, Turku, Finland) was paced for the first 600-800m by Aulis Kallio of Finland. On May 5, 1956 in Los Angeles, Jim Bailey ran the first unpaced sub-4, beating countryman Landy, 3:58.6 to 3:58.7; Bailey = 6th man sub-4 and first on U.S. soil.

They know because downvotes! Grrr... how dare you offend.

Now I'll offend THEM. Face it fankids, Bannister was just one of a big crowd of milers picking up where Hägg and Andersson left off 10 years earlier. Besides being lucky to beat the others to it, he'd still be a historical footnote were it not for the media fairy tale spun around him.

Nobody with any sense thought sub 4 was impossible or even unlikely. 4:12 was reached almost as soon as serious competion began in the 19th century! The history of the event is full of huge chunks repeatedly being knocked off toward 4 flat.

There may have been a few more talented milers, but how many other world class runners have made such lifetime contributions to the sport and to human health in general? If you add up the sum of what he did as a competitive runner plus what he did for the remaining 60+ years of his life, he's the GOAT, no contest.

I know that the Finn led for a few hundred yards (including, as I recall, the slowest part of the race), but I don't believe that Landy's decision to sit back for a while before taking off less than two laps into the race and running most of the race from the front with Chataway in hot pursuit made it anything remotely like Bannister's absurd (and, by the standards of the day, disqualifiable) collaborations with world-class runners like Chataway and Brasher acting as Bannister's domestiques rather than his competitors (of which he generally had none, with the notable exception of the 1954 Commonwealth Games mile (which you apparently also classify as a "paced" sub-4, even by Landy).

What was his Win Loss record?

Don't think it was great

Still a psychological barrier. His argument is like saying that El G's 3:26 is not a psychological barrier. Of course it is. It's still also true that El G's WR was due to full throttle EPO.

Both things can be true. I actually mentioned Rudolf Harbig dying in the War, who might have broken 4 minutes if he had lived and moved up to the 1500/mile.

Look at how many people started running sub 3:50 miles after John Walker broke it. Hell, a washed up John Walker ran faster than his own WR. Same with the 1500m and the number of sub 3:32 runners as soon as Coe and Ovett started running those times routinely. 4 minutes was a bigger psychological barrier than 3:50 or just about any other mark in athletics history.

People here, maybe the majority, think that a sub 1:40 800m is 'impossible', or that El G's WRs will never be broken, despite the simple fact that shoe and track technology will ensure that they are broken eventually.

Others mentioned that WW2 and lots of talented runners dying was a cause of the 'delay'. Well maybe at the time people were unsure whether the future generations would even be as talented as pre-war, as perhaps all the athletic and brave had been killed?

Of course Bannister was lucky to be at the right time in history to break 4 minutes, but you can say the same about any athlete being the first to break a historic mark. Cram was lucky that Coe and Ovett or even Ryun or Herb Elliott hadn't gone under 3:30. Aouita was lucky that David Moorcroft didn't have pacers, or that Henry Rono was an alcoholic.

Intelligent argument. You´re basically saying "he´s wrong - period. I don´t have to prove it. He just is." That´s how children argue.

The talk about a physical or psychological 4-minute barrier has been repeated countless times over the decades, and it's nonsense.

For Bannister, in particular, the first four-minute mile wasn't a barrier; it was a multi-year obsession that focused not only on his own running and racing, but also on what all of his competitors were doing at any given time and how Bannister might be able to beat them out of the the big prize by scheduling some of the most ridiculous and unethical paced productions in the history of the sport. The nadir, I suppose, may have come when American Wes Santee was scheduled to run what might could have turned out to be the first sub-four mile on June 27, 1953, at a meet in Ohio. Bannister hastily arranged for a mile run for a few adults to be inserted into a schoolboy meet in the London area, with this adult mile to take place about five hours before Santee's race in Ohio. With his connections, Bannister arranged for Australian Olympian Don MacMillian (in London at the time) to pace the first half-mile, with Chris Brasher to jog the first lap in about two minutes so that he could take over as a fresh pacer for Bannister for the rest of the "race," even though Brasher was a lap down and would end up pacing Bannister to the end with his own four-minute 3/4 mile performance. Bannister ended up with a time of 4:02 for the mile, which would have a new British record, but the whole scheme was so obviously unethical that Bannister was simply disqualified for conduct unbecoming of the sport. After that embarrassment, Bannister and his athletic and journalistic supporters learned to tone down the crassness of their fraudulent "races" a bit, but if Bannister's May 1954 time trial had been as carefully scrutinized by the British athletic press as they would have for a sub-four by someone else -- like the American Santee, or the Australian Landy, or -- God forbid! -- an uneducated East African in a current or former British colony, I'm pretty sure that Bannister would not have become known as the first first four-minute miler.

I'll save my more general thoughts about Bannister, including his post-May 1954 behavior, for later. He's an interesting psychological study, whose reputation rests largely on a massive collection of exaggerations and outright falsehoods, and the central character in a myth that reflects much about the somewhat peculiar British class system and its underlying tenets.

So basically this is all about yanks jealous and bitter over a Brit performing the most famous feat in athletics history?

What?

To clarify, Bailey = first unpaced "first" sub-4

Landy's first sub-4 had a rabbit, and yes, his first sub-4 was more "pure" and much more a race than Bannister's first sub-4.

What does it matter? Back then they had so few races with meaningful international competition, it was almost a matter of complete luck whether they would find themselves in a fast race. Even today with the Diamond League and more than half a dozen fast paced packed races, you can still get the top 3 or 4 times in the season just from one race that happened to be the fastest. Bannister had the Olympic final. Then he had the Commonwealth Games final. And that was pretty much it as far as 'real races' were concerned.

Bannister showed there was nothing artificial about his achievement when he convincingly beat Landy in a real race.

It matters to document the sub-4 Mile history as accurately & completely as possible, warts & all, particularly as time passes.

In short, Bannister cemented his name and the Mile’s place in history with the first sub-4
minute Mile, and to this day, Bannister’s iconic, still resonating mark is the watershed moment for the Mile.

fantastic critical thinking ability

🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷