It is curious to have a few minutes of your youth continually replayed. I am not complaining. Agony at the time, it is enjoyable enough to look back upon my White City race with Vladimir Kuts. I am surprised and, I suppose, pleased that it has continued to be cited through the years as one of the sport's most exciting races.
What is it, though, that determines which sporting event is remembered and which forgotten? Generals and politicians are assessed and reassessed. Young scholars try to make their mark by denting the reputation of some historical figure and gradually their arguments are absorbed or rejected. There is no such process for past sportsmen.
Although sport is increasingly prominent in the academic curriculum, the study of sport is concerned principally with its social effects. To weigh the athletic strengths and weaknesses of the individuals who have flitted across the sporting stage would hardly be regarded as a serious academic pursuit. But that will not deter me from a brief attempt.
How good was our generation of British runners? Only fairly good seems to be the honest answer. Measured solely on athletic prowess there are a dozen or so middle-distance runners who dominated the 20th century, from Paavo Nurmi in the 1920s through Emil Z?topek and Vladimir Kuts in the 1950s to Hicham El Guerrouj and Haile Gebrselassie today. All won multiple Olympic or world titles and reduced the world records of their day by such substantial margins that they stood for many years.
In the 1950s we ran in the long shadow of Gunder H?gg, who was undoubtedly one of these all-time greats. In Sweden in the early 1940s, while the rest of the world was otherwise engaged, H?gg and Arne Andersson again and again rewrote the middle-distance record book. H?gg finished up with all seven recognised world records between 1500m and 5000m, and between one and three miles. A decade later most of those records were still intact.
Although we beat his times, none of us came near to matching H?gg as an athletic phenomenon. Roger Bannister famously beat his mile time (a record that was recaptured for Britain by Derek Ibbotson a couple of years later). I beat his 5000m and three mile times, although the latter was certainly not one of his best, because the Swedes ran the mile distances much less often than the metric. But none of our records lasted more than a few weeks. None could be said to have set new levels of achievement. Chris Brasher, with his win in the steeplechase at Melbourne, was the only one of our generation to secure an Olympic gold medal.
The best British record of the period was probably achieved by Gordon Pirie, the second BBC sports personality of the year, when he beat H?gg's 5000m time by 20 seconds in 1956. This had certainly been one of H?gg's best, because it had taken the mighty Z?topek five years of undisputed supremacy before modestly bettering it. And yet Pirie's performance is forgotten. It is years since I have seen it shown or even mentioned. The truth is that in sport it is not the dry statistics but the stories that get retold. People have always needed stories and in our day sport has become one of the main providers.
What was the Chataway vs Kuts story? In strictly athletic terms, if there is anything worth recalling about that race, it is the extraordinarily uneven pace of it. Kuts, who led from the start until the last few yards, tried to break away with repeated fast bursts of varying lengths and of a severity never seen before and rarely since. It wins its place in sport's memory bank, however, as a vignette from the cold war. There was Kuts, the unknown Soviet Stakhanovite, who came from nowhere to annihilate Z?topek and me at the European Championships in Berne in August 1954. Then came the rematch at White City in October.
Mounted police held back crowds struggling to get into the packed stadium. In the days when television was a novelty and football had not yet come to dominate all other sports, the big athletics meeting was a major draw. Placed socially somewhere between the boaters and blazers of Henley or Wimbledon and the cloth caps of the football terraces, most of our followers could be identified as lower-middle class. When the gates were closed, those people shut out broke a few police barriers. But there was no violence; it was just the pressure of numbers.
The stadium was without floodlighting so a couple of searchlights dramatically pinpointed the runners. And at the end, when the iron man from Russia was defeated by the supposedly casual, cigar-smoking Oxford 23 year old, it was reassuring to feel that the Soviet Union was not invincible.
That was not, of course, how I saw it. I ran for myself. To me then patriotism and sport were entirely separate. In the aftermath of war, when those just older than me had fought and sometimes died for humanity, it seemed to me offensive that journalists and fans employed martial language to describe sporting achievements. With the arrogance of youth I found it laughable that anyone would think better or worse about Britain as a result of my performance on a running track.
Some years later Kuts chipped away at the fairytale element of the race by claiming that he only lost because he thought the finishing line was at the end of the straight and not the middle. It does not look like that to me from the film, and by the time he said this Kuts was an alcoholic, a condition from which he died in his forties. Still, it might be true, in which case it is another reminder that sheer luck is so often the unacknowledged partner in any success.
It was certainly my good fortune that television viewers voted a few weeks after my race had monopolised prime time on the only channel. The award would no doubt have gone to Roger Bannister if similar coverage could have been given to the Empire Games in Vancouver, in August. His win there over John Landy, who had by then overtaken his mile record, was thrilling, superbly judged: an even better performance than his first sub four-minute mile.
That first sub four-minute mile, in which I had a supporting role as one of the two pacemakers, was a wonderful occasion and a huge achievement, the significance of which has been buried under a mound of myths and stories.
One example can be found in 1,000 Years, 1,000 People, a bestselling 1999 book by four American academics and journalists. Among the men and women who are deemed to have shaped the millennium are most of the expected names - Columbus, Shakespeare, Aquinas, Churchill and William the Conqueror. Ronald Reagan does not make it, nor does John F Kennedy. But there near the end, ahead of Marilyn Monroe, is Roger Bannister.
In the words of the compilers, "people believed it was physically impossible for man to break the four minute barrier. Bannister, a medical student at Oxford, approached running scientifically, studying the physiological mechanics of the sport... by doing what could not be done, Bannister reminded us that our greatest struggles are within ourselves."
A few years ago I attended a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society about Mount Everest by a young British climber. By way of analogy he told the audience that before Bannister's success, it had been widely believed that running a mile inside four minutes could prove fatal. In fact hardly anybody with an interest in athletics could really have believed in the 1950s that it was impossible, let alone life-threatening, to run a mile inside four minutes. For one thing, Gunder H?gg and a couple of others had done roughly the equivalent by running 3:43 for 1500m. The difference between the records for the 1500m and the mile, which is less than 110 metres further, has since then stayed fairly constant at 17 seconds. H?gg's mile record was 4:01.2 but his 1500m time suggested that a four-minute mile was achievable.
Even so, in 1954 nobody had bettered that mile time in 12 years and breaking four minutes had become, particularly in the world of imperial measures, a high-profile objective. No doubt some of the books, documentaries and articles being produced to celebrate the 50th anniversary next year will rehash or add to the myths. But the real story is good enough.
It began with crushing disappointment at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Bannister, an ambitious medical student, had geared his whole athletic career to winning an Olympic gold medal in the 1500m. He would then retire to devote his energies to his profession. At the last moment the organisers added a round of semi-finals. Bannister was unprepared for three races on three consecutive days and finished fourth in an undistinguished field in the final.
He did not want to end his athletic career without any great achievement. Nor did he want to continue for another four years to the next Olympics. So he seized on the idea of breaking H?gg's world mile record and getting below the magic four minutes.
He wrote to me after Helsinki to ask whether I would act as pacemaker later that season. He was not by nature a frontrunner and would stand no chance unless somebody else led for most of the way. But I was reluctant. In the Helsinki Olympics I had been ahead entering the final straight of the 5000m, when I tripped and crashed to the ground as Z?topek swept past me. Britain's only gold medal at that Olympics was won by a horse. So the press made the most of me in the traditional role of gallant British loser. With all that effort and excitement I had had enough. I felt that I could not run any more. Bannister dropped the idea of a four-minute mile attempt for that year.
The next year, 1953, I worked for my finals at Oxford and did no serious running. Bannister made one attempt, in which Chris Brasher dawdled round two laps while the field covered three. Brasher rejoined the race to help Bannister over the final stretch. The time of 4:02 was disallowed as a British record, because the British Amateur Athletic Board (BAAB) said a record could only be set against real competition - which Brasher clearly was not.
By the winter of 1953-54, Bannister, Brasher and I were all working in London and met regularly to train. The enduring appeal of the four-minute mile story owes much, I am sure, to the fact that it was such a modest, almost private, affair. There was no build-up and no attempt to publicise.
When it came to the record attempt, the only journalists we alerted were the McWhirter twins, later famous for launching the Guinness Book of Records. They ensured that a BBC camera was present at Iffley Road, Oxford. There were few reporters and only about a thousand spectators. Norris McWhirter would say in later years that he must subsequently have met all hundred thousand of them.
The conditions on the day were not ideal. But, if modesty will allow the observation, the pacing was superb. Brasher, leading for more than two laps, resisted Bannister's urging to go faster and set exactly the even pace required. I was able to continue until the beginning of the last back straight. Such pacing for 85 per cent of the distance had not happened before and rarely happened again until Paula Radcliffe was paced in this year's London marathon by two Kenyan men.
Bannister's finishing burst, when finally unleashed, was majestic. He was a beautiful runner and the power and fluency of that stride, so well captured by the one BBC camera and so often replayed, has not lost its appeal for me.
After Bannister's feat had been hailed around the world, the BAAB did not have the temerity to question whether Brasher and I had been bona fide competitors. Of course we were not. But we did not flaunt the fact. Indeed Brasher would say, somewhat unconvincingly, that he had dreamed of winning himself. From then on pacemaking was definitely legal.
It had taken 68 years to bring down the record of the Victorian professional Walter George by nearly 14 seconds. It would be reduced by as much again in less than 40 years. So is the record at Oxford that day remembered because it centred on a round number?
That is part of it of course. The achievement too has an alliterative ring. As Shoaib Akhtar bowls at 100 mph the commentator describes it as the four-minute mile of cricket. (When it is finally attained, the two-hour marathon will not trip off the tongue so easily.)
A mile is also the basic measurement of distance in the Anglo-Saxon world, and with the popularity over recent decades of running and jogging, particularly in the US, hundreds of thousands are used to timing themselves over a mile and can visualise the sort of speed that is required to do it in under four minutes. The Four-Minute Mile, the book that Bannister wrote in 1955, is in print in the US to this day.
The enduring appeal, though, is that the race is seen as amateurism's last hurrah. John Bryant's book 3:59.4: The Quest to Break the 4 Minute Mile, published next year, will trace the transition from so-called pedestrianism in the 18th century, when large sums were wagered on professional runners, to Bannister's breakthrough.
The new age of amateurism began in the mid-19th century at Cambridge University, and Bannister's Oxford race in the mid-20th can be seen as its spectacular closing ceremony. Here was a part-time athlete, for whom sport had never been more than a serious hobby, shattering one of the most high-profile records of the day. The sight of a recreational runner breasting the tape in a top-class distance race would soon be just a memory.
There were, in fact, few reasons to regret the passing of amateurism. What had begun as an attempt by gentlemen to keep the professionals out because they were too good - even in 1900 most of the best records were held by professionals - had degenerated into an unattractive hypocrisy.
All the iron curtain athletes were full-time professionals, mostly with theoretical jobs in the armed forces. Some of the Americans were similarly placed with university sports scholarships. Money in brown envelopes was proffered by promoters. Many of the great athletes, like Nurmi and H?gg, finished their careers with expulsion for accepting cash.
We did not take the brown envelopes. But we did in the end, I suppose, legally earn more than some of those humiliated and expelled. The autobiographical articles I wrote on retirement from athletics served to finance me through years as a barely paid junior education minister with a young family in the governments of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas Home. Bannister generously gave half the royalties from his book to athletics coaching, but the serialisation rights and a contract with the Sunday Times saw him through the lean early years of what turned out to be a distinguished career in medicine.
What still renders Bannister's feat so remarkable was that he was a recreational athlete who clambered to the very peak of a sport already dominated by full-time runners. Z?topek had led the way by covering up to 200 miles a week in training and Kuts, Gordon Pirie, John Landy and the rest all had regimes similar in volume to the great athletes of today. We thought, quite wrongly as it turned out, that you must have to be pretty thick to spend your life like that.
In contrast, we looked back to New Zealander Jack Lovelock, Oxford's winner of the 1936 Olympic 1500m. So far from achieving invincibility through new medical insights, Bannister pursued a style of training that was being rendered obsolete.
We thought it important above all to avoid staleness. During the athletics season we trained four or five times a week, covering a total of 20 to 25 miles. We often pretended to do even less, since the appearance of effortless superiority was much admired in the Oxford of our day, with most of the people getting first-class degrees claiming never to do any work. (Bevil Rudd, another legendary Oxford Olympic winner in the 1920s, was said to have laid down his cigar at the start of a 400m. On picking it up after breaking the university record, he remarked that it was drawing nicely.)
It took me some time to realise on first arriving at Oxford that Bannister might be training a little more than was apparent. Although he rarely appeared at the running track, there were persistent reports of solitary runs around various playing fields.
All this should have added up to no more than some minor enhancement of Oxford's reputation as the home of lost causes. Instead, thanks largely to sheer willpower, here was Bannister, not in some vast stadium with cheering crowds and white-coated officials but amid a motley group of students, capturing a record that had eluded many full-time athletes.
The irony was that, far from the Oxford ideal of apparently effortless superiority, the only way to win with such light training as ours was extraordinary, and obviously painful, effort. Bannister's semi-conscious collapse over the finishing line that day is in stark contrast to the untroubled appearance of today's athletes at the end of much faster races.
But it is a feat and a set of images that still speak over half a century to the recreational sportsmen and women of today. The golfer dreaming of a round to rival Tiger Woods or the tennis player wondering, after a game in which every serve was an ace, how she would fare against the Williams sisters, can look back to a recreational runner who scattered the Williams's and Woods of his day.
Would we have gone faster if we had understood the superiority of the new training methods and followed them? Certainly. Do I wish I had? I do not think so. I regret not having done as well as I could at some other stages of my life. But to have done better as a runner would have meant giving up a lot.
As it was, I was able, while running, to be ITN's first newscaster to cover the party conferences for the BBC, doing the main political interviews with Bob McKenzie of the LSE. I was also a Panorama reporter - at a miners' strike in south Wales one week, interviewing the shah in Tehran the next. Anyway, even if I had chosen the life of a professional athlete I probably should not have been able to supplant athletes of the calibre of Z?topek and Kuts.
Bannister could have joined the all-time greats at 1500m and the mile, winning Olympic gold, setting multiple records and dominating the track until the arrival in the late 1950s of Herb Elliot from Australia. But it would have been at the expense of his medical career, and for what purpose?
After all, none of those all-time greats of the track were rated ahead of Marilyn Monroe in a list of the second millennium's most influential people. In sport it is the stories, not the statistics, that we remember.
