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Robert Ballard
Discoverer of the Titanic
I had a chance to warm up to success. I had that ego thing that you go through of being on television and newspapers, and all of that sort of thing when the media has their meal with you. I had done that on a smaller scale. So, when this big thing came, I think I had a proper frame of mind about it. A lot of people who succeed, the ones that do it overnight, it can ruin them. But the ones that work at it for a long, long time, like some stars who get discovered after a 30-year career, they tend to handle it better than the people that are a star in their first movie. I'm thankful that I was prepared, as much as you could be, for something like that. It still was quite an experience, but I think I kept my feet on the ground through it all. You can't take it too seriously when the spotlight, to some degree arbitrarily, says "Now you are famous." You say, "Well I don't feel any different." The key is: don't act any different then.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Sir Roger Bannister: There was a coach, but I fell out with him. He said, "You do this." And I said, "Why do I do this?" He said, "Well, you do this because I'm the coach and I tell you to do it." He'd make me do a timed trial and he would be holding a watch and I would say, "What time did I do?" He would say, "Oh, don't worry about that." So, although he had been quite well known -- he was actually the coach to someone called, Jack Lovelock who won the Olympic 1500 meters in Berlin in 1936 -- but I suppose I was always independent. I felt about running that it was my task to find out what suited me and what didn't suit me, how much training could I do and then improve my performance, and not let my performance go down because I was training too hard. These were things which seemed to me so individual that nobody else was going to understand me to this degree.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Just three weeks before the Helsinki Olympics -- the management of the events in the Olympic Games was left to local (Helsinki in this case) organizers. It was said afterwards that there had been a rather deliberate attempt because I was the favorite, to change the program. They had three races on three successive days, which were unnecessary. Previous there had always been the heats, a day's rest or two day's rest, and a final. And that was what I was planning for and I could have coped with it. But by the third day of these successive races, I knew in my heart that it was a virtually impossible task for me. Of course, with that frame of mind too, it did prove impossible. I came fourth. No British gold medals in the Helsinki Olympics except for a horse called Fox Hunter who won an equestrian event. Disaster! Criticism for Bannister. "We told him he should train differently and now it is proved." If I had won the gold medal, I would probably have retired because Olympic gold medals, 1500 meters, there was nothing higher and I would just have gone on with my work. But, I felt angry with the press, angry at myself, angry with the organizers of the event and thought about it. I knew that I could go on for two more years when the equivalent of an Olympic prize would have been the European championships and the Commonwealth games. That would have meant most of the great runners, not unfortunately, the American runners. The rest of the world would have been represented. So after thought, I decided it would be possible to work and go on training. It proved difficult.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
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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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Gradually, administration begins to come into the equation, but after a car accident when I was 45 -- which I had quite severe injuries -- it wasn't my fault, but there we are. I was badly injured and I had a time to rethink. And I was then getting too busy in too many directions. I was being asked to see more private patients and so on, and I made the conscious decision then that I wouldn't do any more private practice and there was already an area of research, the autonomic nervous system, which was relatively neglected. It was between cardiology and neurology, and these areas in between are often the province of neither specialty, and so can lag behind. And that was the area I chose and this changed the second half of my life, if you like, because I then set up a laboratory.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
The war caught me at Stanford University. I was a graduate student maybe some six weeks. You know, I came to this --'73 year and just began, you know. And I was called from Yom Kippur in California, Yom Kippur was already -- you know, coming ten hours later than in Israel so we were just after the Yom Kippur ceremony in the kind of Hillel auditorium of Stanford University, when I woke up in the morning and was told that there is a war in Israel. I called the attaché in the embassy and said, "I'm a lieutenant colonel. I'm moving immediately." So the general told me, "Oh, I don't think we are missing a major war." I told him "What is--" I asked him, "What is we? You are here on official loan. I'm still a commander. I cannot afford being out of the country even if in a not very serious kind of war. I'm going there. I will call you from New York." And I went immediately to the airport, San Francisco airport. I kissed my wife. My eldest daughter was maybe two years old.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
He (Rabin) called upon me and he told me, "Ehud, look, I cannot explain it, and I cannot prove it. It's not mathematics that you like so much, but in political life timing is everything. You can never, never predict what will follow. I need you now." And so I left it and after a legal kind of cooling off period of some 100 days, I came into his government. And no one of us even kind of contemplated or weighed in mind what really happened, that five months later Rabin was assassinated. I found myself immediately shocked but not out of balance and entering Peres's government as his foreign minister and a few months later Peres was defeated in the general elections, and Netanyahu took over and within another few months I became the leader of the Labor Party. And so it happened that I came somewhat like a storm through political life. It never happened in the political history of Israel that someone who was totally out of political life became a prime minister within four years, and a half or so.
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