Roger Bannister sub-4 spikes up for auction - HOW THE HELL DID HE GO SUB 4 IN THESE!?!?

Fanrun wrote:

It's Dr, and Sir Roger. He was knighted

Yeah, that book was published in 1973

Hingle McCringleberry wrote:

The Legend of R.B. wrote:

he was a med student at the time as well

This is the key thing to focus on. Wake up people.

nobody wants to believe their heroes were using amphetamines during the two or three decades they were entirely legal.

Bad Wigins wrote:

Hingle McCringleberry wrote:

This is the key thing to focus on. Wake up people.

nobody wants to believe their heroes were using amphetamines during the two or three decades they were entirely legal.

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Vertical Jump wrote:

Has anyone ran sub 4 without shoes on?!

Lamprecht, who was also the first athlete in the world to run a sub-4 minute Mile barefoot, would break the magical 4 minute barrier five times (and the 16th man overall).

The Legend of R.B. wrote:

I've gotta look up his training logs. Can anyone give a brief rundown of his training? How does it compare with modern practices.

The low mileage training was good enough for one four-minute mile, but not good enough to medal in Olympics because of the preliminary heats.

Without heats, the training could still apply today, right?

The thing I don't get is how they are only expected to fetch a max of £50,000.

Awful paintings go for one million. I'd honestly think they would go for at least $10 million.

http://www.athleticsweekly.com/featured/roger-bannisters-sub-four-minute-mile-shoes-to-be-auctioned-23005/

Some "Fool" paid $5 million for the letters "FOOL" on a canvas:

http://www.artsumo.com/blog/post/4/They_Paid_What_Top_10_Absurd_Paintings_that_Sold_for_Millions/

I have a pair of John Landy's track spikes from that time period. It can't be understated how difficult it must have been to run in those shoes. They were almost as rigid as a pair of figure skates.

The shoes were auctioned off at a fundraiser here in the states. Nobody knew or cared about them. The guy who bid on them gave them to me as a gift because they did not mean anything to him either. They were just collecting dust in his house. He put a bid on them because he felt bad that nobody was interested and John Landy was in attendance at the fundraiser. I was so excited about it I nearly had a heart attack when he gave them to me.

That's why they are expected to only go for 50k, because only us running geeks really care.

the stopwatch made £20,000

http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/12957489.Sir_Roger_record_watch_sold_for___20_000/

Unbelievable that these aren't in the English version of the Smithsonian or something.

Lots of misinformation bandied about here regarding RGB's training. Thank you, Hard Loper, for coming along with a significant entry. Further interesting would be the discussion of the experimental training of John Landy. VERY intense, very monotonous, and very effective.

low mileage results wrote:

The Legend of R.B. wrote:

I've gotta look up his training logs. Can anyone give a brief rundown of his training? How does it compare with modern practices.

The low mileage training was good enough for one four-minute mile, but not good enough to medal in Olympics because of the preliminary heats.

Without heats, the training could still apply today, right?

Bannister *may* have finished higher than 4th in the 1952 Olympics had he trained differently & somehow been capable of an identical PR while recovering faster from prelims. BUT, IMHO most if not all of his "poor" performance in 1952 stems from--1) him not being psychologically prepared the number of rounds, and being thrown for a loop when he discovered he'd have to run an extra race, and 2) Most importantly, by far--he simply wasn't in his 1954 shape in 1952. In the European Championships in 1954 he won easily with a last 200 in @ 25xx.

probably more 1 than 2. He was in great shape as evidenced by his 3/4 time-trial, which should have given him a lot of confidence going into the games.

His best pre-Olympic performance was a 3/4 time-trial in the “unbelievable” time of 2:52.9, which was 3.7 seconds faster than the unofficial WR. Then came the blow. It was announced that there would be an extra round in the Olympic 1,500. That meant three races in three consecutive days. Bannister recalls reading the news and realizing he just hadn't prepared himself to run three hard races in three days. Taking this attitude into the Games, he could manage only fifth in the semi-finals, finishing “blown and unhappy.” (FFM,156) Clearly over-stressed and expending the valuable nervous energy he had learned was essential to his success, Bannister was aching in his legs and unable to sleep on the eve of the final. He said he “hardly had the strength to warm up.” (FFM, 158)

Would not all the other athletes in the final have had to have gone through the same stress and surprise of having to run another qualifying round to reach the final?

running philosophy wrote:Ralph Doubell's run was altitude aided on a synthetic track. Snell's was on grass.

Advantage Lydiard.

no

doubell's run at sea-level wouda been

~ 1'43-mid/high

altitude does you no favours for 800m

it's a handicap

Rudy in same year he ran 1'40.9WR only managed 1'42.1 at nairobi which is much lower altitude than mexico

also only managed only 1'42.8 in nairobi same year he ran 1'41.0 in rieti & berlin

advantage stempfl

reader of the forums wrote:

Bad Wigins wrote:

nobody wants to believe their heroes were using amphetamines during the two or three decades they were entirely legal.

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Deliberate ignorance of the evidence isn't absence of evidence.

If you're too lazy or full of denial to learn about early doping on your own steam, that's your problem. It's not my job to teach you history.

The Legend of R.B. wrote:

Amazing, the guy would have been incredible as a full-time T&F athlete today with modern technology and training.

Bannister was indeed an inspirational athlete and he accomplished much in life besides his athletics.

However, athletics in his day was an entirely amateur sport and for his era he was the equivalent of an NOP athlete. He ran numerous physiological tests on himself in the laboratory working on how much oxygen debt he could tolerate and towards end of his career he was advised by Franz Stampfl who was the 1950s equivalent to Alberto Salazaar. His mile world record in 1954 was a finely tuned effort backed by top pacemakers Chris Chattaway and Chris Brasher who were both world-class runners for their time. All three trained together for several months in an orchestrated effort to assault the mile world record. To reiterate, guys such as Bannister, Chattaway and Brasher were training under conditions that were pretty much the best the world had to offer in the 1950s.

In stark contrast, the athlete who finished 3rd (in a time of 4 mins 16 secs) in Bannister's world-record run, Tom Hulatt had to make his daily living doing back-breaking work as a miner with some work as a rat-catcher in his spare time. The only training that he was able to do with this lifestyle was to run/commute to his work in the mines. To draw another paralell with the NOP, before the start of the world-record race Hulatt was specifically ordered to stay out of the way of the Bannister/Brasher/Chattaway trio. Hulatt died back in 1990 aged only 59 years.

Runnah wrote:

Would not all the other athletes in the final have had to have gone through the same stress and surprise of having to run another qualifying round to reach the final?

The other athletes were already doing higher volume and not part time training like Bannister was.

Vent - why did Ralph never break 1:46 at sea level if the altitude was such a handicap?

Yes, I may be a little bias - but the fact still remains that outside of his two runs in Mexico, he was a 1:46 man at best.

Josy Barthel wrote:

The other athletes were already doing higher volume and not part time training like Bannister was.[/quote]

There were no professional athletes in Bannister's era and so every single competitor in the 1500m was doing "part time training" as you put it (see acounts of Landy's training etc ..). Every competitor had to deal with an extra qualifying round in the 1952 Olympics 1500m and yet for whatever reason, English press reports imply that only Bannister was handicapped by this. Guys such as Werner Lueg were training under very difficult conditions in the aftermath of WW2. For the English press, it seems that the 1952 Olympic final was not "Bannister certified".