An enduring image

There was surely more applause, at that stage, for the Yorkshire v Oxford cricket match, a couple of miles away at the Parks, where Freddie Trueman took three wickets in the first over, including that of Colin Cowdrey.

Because I was then a reporter with Athletics World, the monthly magazine edited by the fact-finding Guinness Book of Record twins, Norris and Ross McWhirter, you knew what was being attempted.

Brasher and Chataway had visited the magazine's little London office because the twins were former Oxford athletes who understood the international scene and when it was the right time to beat the mile record barrier ahead of Australian and American rivals. It was so cold and windy that evening at 6pm at Oxford that the record attempt was nearly called off by Bannister, a highlystrung thoroughbred of the track compared with Brasher, the catalyst, and Chataway, the pragmatist, both eventually encouraging him, as well as dynamic Austrian coach Franz Stampfl, into historic action.

How closely these three musketeers were linked I shall never forget, standing just three feet inside the track, with my Oxford schoolboy brother beside me, as they came charging past after 220 yards, Bannister shouting "faster, Chris" only to be wisely ignored by Brasher who knew that he was right on schedule.

Once big-chested Chataway took Roger through to the final backstraight it was obvious that the record attempt was 'on' in spite of the wind and the cold. The famous picture of the finish, both young and middle-aged spectators ecstatic, shows one crouching figure half shielding his eyes, the recorder's official board under one arm.

This was the late Charles Wenden, subsequently Bursar of All Souls', and such a close friend of Roger's that he later admitted: "No, I wasn't praying that he'd done it. I was actually weeping."

The bonds of university sport were that close.

For me the epitome of the best of the old and eventually out-dated amateurism, I now appreciate, was earlier watching Roger train alone at the old Paddington track, paying three old pence as a 'user' before rushing back to his medical work at St Mary's Hospital.

He had a career, a vocation to follow, just as Chataway eventually moved with élan into both politics and civil aviation and my muchmissed chum Brasher into journalism and then business.

Years later, after we had been watching the 1968 Mexico Olympics together in the press box, wearing sombreros to shield us from the sun while Roger, on a day off from a Sunday paper, took down the results for me and commented most liberally on a black American protest, I tentatively asked him, in a noisy bus, what was his current work in medicine.

For a weird moment I thought, from his typically diffident reply, that he was actually revising his brain. The correct answer, I appreciated within minutes, is one that still remains in my physiotherapist wife's book-shelves: "Brain's Clinical Neurology, fourth edition. Revised by Roger Bannister."

As an expert on physiology, and now 13 times a grandfather, 75-year-old Roger can just about imagine that the present world mile record of 3min 43.13sec by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco - who has told me how much he admires what his British predecessor did as a groundbreaker - might be brought down to 3min 30sec one far off day. But without drugs?

The young man I saw burst through the tape at Oxford half-a-century ago, can now only hope.

"I cannot imagine a world without sport and all its pleasures that I have enjoyed, including walking, cycling, sculling, sailing and playing embarrassingly bad golf. But sport without fairness, allowing drugs, is nothing but a cheat's charter. Surely our children deserve better than that?"