biographies

Any amateur sports historian knows the name of the first person to break the four minute mile barrier. But until you read this book, you will know but a third of the story. For a brief span of years in the fifties, running was the glamour sport, and three very distinct personalities were its superstars. Wes Santee, the consumate brash American farmboy from Kansas; John Landy, the driven and professional Australian; and Roger Bannister, the epitome of the amateur athlete. How can a book about running be interesting? By examining the personalties of the principals and the surrounding societal framework. The way nations united behind their respective represenatives is amazing. Bascomb does a brillant job by looking at all three individuals separately, then deftly weaves their fates together. Santee was the first to directly challenge the idea of a four minute mile, and Landy trained the hardest, but Bannister was the first to break it. And a climax of having the only two sub-four minute milers in history racing against each other sounds like a movie, but it really happened! (Incidentally, they both broke the barrier again.) The details of training and endurance are agonizing to read, let alone experience, and will leave you with great respect for the sport of running. I don't want to give too much of the book away, but Bannister comes across not only as a superior athlete, but an incredible human being. He gets married, becomes a doctor, and runs a sub-four minute mile in a four month span - and earns the respect of the world in doing so. One more tidbit to entice: "it sounds like a movie". Well, it will become one soon, created by the same team that produced Seabiscuit. So get a running start, and enjoy The Perfect Mile.

Our systems of measurements are arbitrary; a mile is an artificial distance, and a minute is an artificial time. But everyone has heard the phrase "the four minute mile." It might be arbitrary, but as a footrace there is also some symmetry to it. Four minutes, four times around the quarter mile track, a strict fifteen miles per hour. For years, the four minute mile was a monument as an impenetrable barrier, and when Roger Bannister broke the barrier fifty years ago, the whole world took notice. It was Bannister's victory, of course, and often he was depicted as a lone athlete out to break the record, but there is more to the story. In _The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less than Four Minutes to Achieve It_ (Houghton Mifflin), Neal Bascomb gives a full and exciting history of events leading to one of the most impressive accomplishments in sports.

Necessarily, the other two runners, Australian John Landy and American Wes Santee are mere also-rans, but their efforts were heroic, and as Bascomb makes clear, there may have been only matters of happenstance, like weather, that kept them from being first. Like Bannister, they had failed to get medals in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and returned home determined to take the four minute mile upon their return home. Bannister was restricted by his medical studies; he could not train for hours every day, as the others did, so he had to concentrate his training into exhausting short daily bursts. His medical background helped, however, in researching the effects of exercise, giving him scientific assurance he could do it. On 6 May 1954 Bannister made a real try at the barrier. He had, by that time, taken on a coach, and he had two friends to serve as pacemakers. The breaking of the record was a worldwide sensation.

It is not, however, the perfect mile of the title. Even the jubilant British press questioned just how cricket it was to use pacemakers and not sheer competition, and the three aspirants in the quest had never run against each other. The three were scheduled to run in the Empire games in Vancouver three months after Bannister's epochal run, which would satisfy everyone as to who was the fastest miler. The only pacemakers would be the runners themselves. There were heartbreaking complications that prevented Santee from running; they had to do with US athletic authorities who persecuted and banned him because he allegedly breached his amateur status. Both Bannister and Landy did under four minutes in Vancouver in an exciting race, thrillingly described here. This was a classic victory. There was no hint of doping, television did not make it into an extravaganza, and the competitors were not millionaires. The result made front page headlines all over the world; what subsequent footrace has done that? _The Perfect Mile_ thus takes us back to a simpler time, but this is a welcome story of timeless heroes.

"The Perfect Mile" is a fascinating book. It combines character studies of three milers competing to break the four-minute barrier with an enjoyable historical account. It is a well-written and compelling work.