Sir Roger Bannister Interview (page: 8 / 9) Track and Field Legend	Print Interview

People spoke about the four-minute mile as a metaphor for how we can push through barriers and limitations. Did you realize at the time how significant it had been?

Sir Roger Bannister: I really didn't. I regarded it as something which was rather personal. It was British. We were patriotic. An English and European and Australian and New Zealand team, really an Empire team, had climbed Everest the year before. I actually had an attempt the year before, just before the coronation, in the comparable May meeting. It was just a feel it was conceivable. But I ran in 4 minutes, 3.8 seconds. So, it took another year for me to improve and get the pacing right.

When you retired from running, it sounds very calm and very definite. Was it difficult?

Sir Roger Bannister: No, because I was set for it. My core, my whole life was medicine. I wanted to become a specialist. So for ten years I concentrated solely on medicine. It took ten years to become a consultant in neurology. I had a spell in the army, which was necessary then. Fifteen years later, I was asked to be the chairman of the British Sports Council. That has really been the pattern since. Alongside my neurology, I have always had some public involvement in sports and sports promotion.

Immediately after I retired I was a resident. I had married by then, and started having a family. I remember that my salary was 800 pounds a year in residency, with deductions for laundry. So I was fortunate enough to be able to write. I wrote regularly for a leading newspaper, the Sunday Times, mainly on sport, and went to the Olympics, and also wrote regularly for Sports Illustrated, whose first edition was brought out on the occasion of my race against John Landy in Vancouver in the Empire Games

I wrote a book, to get off my chest a number of ideas about what running could mean for people who needed to find something for themselves in adolescence, something which gave them a feeling that life was moving forwards and not backwards. I wrote the book in about six weeks, and the book was well received, but that was the end of my running career. Of course, I came back later to do government work encouraging sports for others but...

Now I had to sink to the bottom of the pile, graduating as a medical student, and I had to do my residencies, and it was a very difficult time in which I had to turn down all the engagements, work for these further exams, catching up on things that I had not been diligent enough to pursue earlier. And my colleagues and my teachers, of course, had some difficulties in dealing with me because I was famous, notorious, infamous, whichever phrase you like to use. And the concept that I could also have a serious career -- and indeed in a very highly competitive field like neurology -- was really rather strange to them. There were those who supported me, but I certainly felt I was being examined rather carefully and had to be more careful than others to start writing medical papers and pass the exams as speedily as I could, and select the appointments.
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There's something quite individual about the way somebody specializing tries to work at particular hospitals with particular individuals in order to increase his experience in the clinical field. We are now talking of clinical medicine, looking after patients, trying to find some area within the field you have chosen where there is a possible advance to be made.

That is essentially what young clinical neurologists are attempting to do. I had to spend two years in the army, which I managed to distort in my favor by using my physiological background to find out why unacclimatized troops were dying in the Middle East. We had a problem in Aden after the Suez crisis. That was a partial distraction, but I wrote some papers about heat illness, all the time trying to make the best of what opportunities were presented. This takes me through a visit to Harvard for a year to get further training.

At the age of 33 I was appointed a consultant at two major London hospitals. In those days, neurology being a super specialty in a small country, the patients that weren't acutely sick would be sent to London.

The most important point I should make is that after retiring from the track I got married in 1955 and we started to have a family. My wife had three children by the time we went to America. So this was a time of consolidation, family life which I could only share to a limited extent because I was still doing my residency appointments. My children remember me working on holidays, when I'd accepted the editorship of a neurological textbook.

Those were years of very hard work, but very happy years because my life was expanding through my wife and my family. She had to work very hard and we turned down invitations all the time, which was rather frustrating, and it would not have been possible if she had not been able to take over that whole side of family life.

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