![]() “It was a great race and such a great moment for B.C.,” Hutchison said. He proved that in such iconic fashion in the 1954 Vancouver Games. He had a goal - the four-minute mile - and he could sprint down the stretch better than any runner and was a great finisher." That had a tremendous effect on all of track and field moving forward. “Bannister revolutionized the idea of going for broke and setting records. “Roger Bannister did for track what Arnold Palmer did for golf,” said Robert Hutchison of Victoria, the sprinter who competed for Canada in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, while Bannister ran the 1,500 metres for Britain. The Miracle Mile left such an indelible impression on this province in its time that it would have been unthinkable not to have Bannister and Landy return in some capacity in 1994.īannister and Landy received honorary degrees from the University of Victoria that year. Jack Harman’s bronze Bannister-Landy statue of that moment still stands in Vancouver.īoth men were invited to Victoria as honorary goodwill ambassadors of the 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games, raising the Games flag during the opening ceremony at Centennial Stadium, as the event returned to B.C. The race became an international sensation, and suddenly, the province was thrust onto the world stage. Bannister famously outsprinted Landy to the tape at Empire Stadium after the Aussie looked over his wrong shoulder to look for the charging Bannister. 7, 1954, both men finished in just under four minutes. He had been slowed in recent years by Parkinson’s disease and, before that, an ankle shattered in a 1975 auto accident.Īfter breaking the four-minute mile barrier, something previously thought out of the reach of human potential, the English running legend competed against John Landy of Australia in the Miracle Mile at the 1954 Vancouver Empire and Commonwealth Games. In a sense, it ushered in the modern age of sport.īannister died Saturday at age 88 in Oxford. Sir Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, was intrinsically linked with the sporting lore of British Columbia.īannister’s feat of clocking three minutes, 59.4 seconds on May 6, 1954, at Oxford, England, is considered one of the defining moments of sport.
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