The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb

Read as part of the sport reading journey

This was written in 2004 but takes its subject matter from 50 years earlier when athletes were strictly amateur and the imperial mile was still the main event. Across three continents three runners vied to be first to run 1 mile inside 4 minutes. Englishman Roger Bannister, Australian John Landy and American Wes Santee each returned from the 1952 Helsinki Olympics disappointed, but as great athletes do, they responded by seeking a new challenge and training harder and smarter.

Bascomb gives some background on each athlete but mainly sticks to the sport – the training, the psychology and the races. Nominally they raced against the clock (like Coe and Ovett in the 80s they avoided direct competition) but always they had their two rivals in mind.

Pieced together from contemporaneous sources and more recent interviews with each protagonist and other eye witnesses, the book gives a sound insight into the three characters; their philosophical approach to the sport and their motivation, as well as their developing techniques and training regimes. The technical information is there, but is concise and does not get in the way of the narrative.

Significant races are graphically described, lap by lap, grimace by grimace. Tension mounts as the times come down. Even if you know who first breaks the barrier, there is still the question of who will win the first face to face meeting (but avoid the spoiler photos in the middle until all is revealed in the text).

My interest in athletics was ignited as a thirteen year old by the 1964 Mexico City Olympics, when Robbie Brightwell’s disappointing silver medal in the 400m was eclipsed by his fiancée Ann Packer’s gold in the 800m. It was a great story and the archive clip still gives me goose-bumps. In those days and even into the 1970s the amateur nature of athletics still held sway, so the Bannister era of fitting training and races around a job and winning no more than instant glory is recognisable to me. For younger readers the contrast is stark indeed with modern full time professional athletes earning prize money and sponsorship deals.

Yet at heart the simplicity of the track athlete, man v man or man v clock, is timeless. This account of the perfect mile stands as testament to that sporting ideal, which may now be shrouded in celebrity, glitz and commercial gain but is, I think, I hope, still there.