The Ordinary Greatness of Roger Bannister | Hacker News Reader

The Ordinary Greatness of Roger Bannister

newyorker.com

32 pointsrefrigerator11 comments

Roger Bannister was far from ordinary in his time. High school runners can run 4 minute miles today, mainly because they have the benefit of knowing how to properly train, thanks to all previous athletes and trainers that came before them. The metaphor "Standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind.

There is a popular TED talk which argues in part that improved technology and training is key to modern records. Bannister is mentioned briefly at 3 minutes in.

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_...

The speaker notes that Bannister ran his mile on a cinder track and claims it degrades performance by 1.5% compared to a modern synthetic track.

Cinder tracks do look like they would be quite soft.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NGgiMDHjKM

This site claims that British cinder tracks were mostly crushed brick rubble. They required heavily spiked shoes.

https://theolympians.co/2015/07/01/the-last-of-the-cinder-tr...

As one old enough, and went to a school poorly-funded enough, to have run on a cinder track, I'm truly surprised at a mere 1.5% performance loss. Perhaps pro-level tracks in the 50s were better taken care of than our high school track, but I'd guess (and this is from memory quite some time ago) double-digit percentages of loss. When we had a home meet on our cinder track, we just ran for place because the times wouldn't even be in the neighborhood of the worst all-weather (paved/hard-surfaced) track. To run 4 minutes on such a thing with 50s nutrition and training? Unimaginable to me.

Let alone compared to the rubberized-surface of a (what used to be) high-level track. Even the local Redmond high school track is miles better than the best I ran on in the 80s.

As for what the "cinders" were made of, I'm pretty sure ours was made from literal cinders. The output of coal-fired power plants, IIRC. It wasn't brick rubble, that's for sure.

I often wonder about the extent of training done by early-modern olympic caliber athletes. As the olympics were originally supposed to be for amateurs, it sounds like a person who devoted most of their time to training was not considered a fair sport.

> it sounds like a person who devoted most of their time to training was not considered a fair sport.

Amateurism in sports is a complex subject, but in many ways has its roots planted in classism. Its similar to how unpaid internships nowadays can reinforce a class divide in certain fields -- those with family support or independent wealth are able to take unpaid internships while those that need the money can't afford to take those opportunities. In similar ways, requiring athletes to be amateurs didn't mean that amateur athletes didn't devote a lot of time to training, it meant that those that couldn't afford to spend their time training while unpaid couldn't compete.

Late 19th century definitions of amateur went even further than that: It restricted "amateurs" to those who had never profited for physical labor. That meant if you worked as a bricklayer and trained unpaid on the side, you were ineligible to compete.

Global talent pool, professionalization, performance enhancing drugs, wide proliferation of training knowledge. Those are the big ones.

I mean he was ordinary in the sense that running wasn't his full time profession and he didn't dedicate his life to it. In order to achieve "greatness" in most any popular sport today you have to be totally dedicated.

In twenty-five years there will probably be high school athletes hitting forehands like Roger Federer.

Interestingly, he probably wasn't the first person to run a mile in four minutes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile#Possible_othe...

Probably none of the previous cases is sufficiently well documented to be recognised on its own, but there are several cases that are 90% certain, or thereabouts, so probably at least one of the previous cases - there are more of them than the three mentioned in the Wikipedia article - did involve someone running a mile in four minutes. There's a whole book on the subject, I think, but I can't remember the title.

None of those are really credible, and "90% certain" doesn't really fit with the level of knowledge you're describing about the other supposed cases.

Not sure what you mean by any of that. There's a bit more info here if you're interested in digging deeper:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27298505 https://www.theactivetimes.com/does-first-four-minute-mile-p...

I can't find the book I was thinking of. I don't think it was "Running: A Global History", but perhaps it was.

(I though this stuff might be interesting for some people. Am I breaking some rule by mentioning it in this context?)

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