Erik Brady: King Charles will make history, but he won't top Roger Bannister

It will come with the requisite pomp and pageantry, but all the tea in London can’t make this May 6 the most meaningful one in modern British history. Blimey, far from it! That honor belongs to Roger Bannister, who on May 6, 1954, ran history’s first sub-4-minute mile.

As it happens, that’s the day I was born at Sisters Hospital. I’ve often said it was this coincidence that destined me to my ink-stained, lucky life as a sports reporter. I even had the opportunity to tell Bannister himself – which is proof enough of my sportswriterly luck.

I visited him in 2004 at his home in Oxford, England, not far from the Iffley Road Track where he sped into history. I had come for a story about the 50th anniversary of his crowning achievement. Charles’s crowning, by contrast, is not so much an achievement as an accident of birth.

Bannister fielded all manner of media requests, with no press agent to coordinate them, in the run-up to the 50th anniversary. I just showed up on the appointed day and knocked on the door. His wife, Moyra, let me in, and in the course of our conversation I mentioned the date of my birth, offering her a peek at my passport. “Why, how very clever of you,” she said.

Then she ushered me into the living room to see the man who had made time stand still 50 years earlier. He was, at 75, genial and courtly and welcoming. We talked for an hour I’ll never forget. His career as a neurologist, he told me, was more meaningful to him than his time as a sportsman.

“The neurology tips the scale heavily in its favor because it is a never-ending quest,” he said. “I think sport is a thing of growing up and being a student.”

Bannister died in 2018. He was 88. The obits noted that he’d been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975. Her coronation came in 1953, the year before Bannister’s magical mile. And now her son’s coronation comes on the 69th anniversary of Sir Roger’s run.

Royal weddings and funerals allow commoners to connect with kings and queens. “But there’s no relatable, real-life equivalent of a coronation,” columnist Gaby Hinsliff wrote in The Guardian the other day. “This ceremony is about the institution of monarchy, stripped of its human softening edges.”

This is why Bannister’s laurel crown means more than any royal one: Running is universal. We’ve all done it, even if few of us did it so well as he did. His mile run of 3:59.4 was seen as astonishing in 1954 because so many people in the scientific and medical communities believed such a thing was beyond human capacity. Bannister, a scientist himself, knew better.

He had finished fourth in the metric mile at the 1952 Summer Olympics, in Helsinki, and this turned out to be a blessing, he told me. Had he won a medal, he said, he would almost certainly have retired from running. And in that case, someone else eventually would have made history in under 4 minutes.

“A bit of early experience of fame shows you that fame is shallow,” Bannister said. “And a bit of experience with reverses shows you that you can recover from them.”

As our interview was winding down, Mark Phillips of CBS arrived. (Phillips will cover the coronation on Saturday as the network’s senior foreign correspondent.) His CBS crew wanted to film Bannister at the Oxford track where he had run into history. I asked to tag along, and Bannister offered to drive me. On the way, he asked a series of questions about American politics and American journalism. After a while I told him that I had never been quizzed by an interview subject in such a way, as if he were interviewing me. Bannister laughed and said a neurologist’s job is always about asking questions: “Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.”

Then he asked about my family. I told him that my father had been a college professor in Buffalo and that C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don, had once written a letter to him in which Lewis called my father his most perceptive critic. What’s more, Oxford’s Bodleian Library asked for the original letter years later, and my father gladly gave it.

“Welcome to Oxford,” Bannister said as we got to campus. “You have a family connection.”

Here’s another: I was born in Buffalo on the day of Bannister’s run, and my father was born in Buffalo at the approximate moment of the sinking of the Titanic, on April 15, 1912. He liked to say that a whale groaned in the mid-Atlantic as a minnow was born on the American side of Lake Erie.

Saturday’s coronation will be at Westminster Abbey. There is a memorial stone there for Sir Roger Bannister. It lists him first as “Pioneering Neurologist,” and only then as “World Champion Runner.”

Long live the king.

Of the mile.