ATHLETICS FACES GENERATIONAL CRISIS 70 YEARS ON FROM SIR ROGER BANNISTER'S RACE OF LIFETIME

When Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, he declared: “The moment of a lifetime had come.”

Yet seventy years on from that seismic day on cinder at Oxford’s Iffley Road, athletics approaches an Olympic summer battling with an identity crisis that threatens this lifetime.

Records have become distorted, new technology has transformed what is possible. And while the sport fights for eyeballs, nudged to the fringes as football reigns more supremely than ever, there are disputes over how the professional calendar is structured.

This Friday a number of British athletes are set to compete in a Diamond League event in Doha that will barely appear on the radar of fans. Former 200m and 400m record holder Michael Johnson has secured more than £25m in funding as he attempts to get a rival competition off the ground because, he says, the Diamond League is failing the sport.

But as triple jump legend Jonathan Edwards says: “Athletics has been struggling since [Usain] Bolt retired. It was one of the premier sports in the world and has now lost its position. And there is muddled thinking around what the sport needs.”

If the battle for acquiring new attention is proving strenuous, many within the sport continue to wrestle with how changes to footwear in the past six years has altered the landscape – especially across longer distances.

Critics argue the carbon revolution has made a mockery of history and times must not be compared. But is that not the equivalent of saying tennis rackets or golf clubs should still be made of wood?

“You can never ignore history,” Colin Jackson says. “It’s never the same. You’ve got to move with the times, go with it. You need to support technology.”

The former hurdling star believes the only thing that matters is ensuring a level playing field between current competitors. “They are all wearing the same shoes now so it’s like-for-like comparing, he says. “We’re not in the past, we’re here.”

Edwards, meanwhile, believes that beyond “incremental changes” the sport had been living in the “dark ages”. Yet Bannister’s achievement was undoubtedly aided by that era’s cutting-edge equipment, a forefather to marginal gains that rubbed off on friends and rivals.

Chris Brasher, co-founder of the London marathon, acted as pacemaker at Iffley Road and two years later went on to win Olympic gold in the 3,000m steeplechase.

His son Hugh, now London’s race director, says: “What the sub-four minute mile did was spur my father on. My father prepared as well as he could in 1956. He had the best coach, he went to Australia six weeks before, he had [specialised] contact lenses in case it rained.”

Simply looking at Bannister’s spikes, auctioned off for more than £250,000 in 2015, could blister the feet of modern stars. But for the era they were innovative, specially made for Bannister and a third lighter than what rivals were putting on.

In the seven decades since, 259 British men have broken the same barrier. The record, last set by Hicham El Guerrouj well before the shoe revolution in 1999, sits at 3:43 but that has perhaps only lasted because the distance is now so seldom run.

Another example of a sport moving on, entering new territory – even if sometimes the popularity waxes and wanes. And as Bannister wrote in The First Four Minutes : “Life must be lived forwards even if sometimes it only makes sense as we look back.”

2024-05-06T05:30:47Z dg43tfdfdgfd