Duel Of The Four-minute Men

THE BRITISH EMPIRE'S BEST Here is how men's records at Vancouver compare with world records
RUNNING	VANCOUVER RECORD		WORLD RECORD
100 yds	Michael Agostini, Trinidad	9.6	Melvin Patton, USA Hector Hogan, Australia	9.3 (1948) 9.3 (1954)
220 yds	Donald Jowett, New Zealand	21.5	Melvin Patton, USA	20.2 (1949)
440 yds	Kevan Gosper, Australia	47.1	Herbert McKenley, Jamaica	46.0 (1948)
880 yds	Derek Johnson, England	1:50.7	Malvin Whitfield, USA	1:48.6 (1953)
1 mile	Roger Bannister, England	3:58.8	John Landy, Australia	3:58.0 (1954)
3 mile	Christopher Chataway, England	13:35.2	Fred Green, England	13:32.2 (1954)
6 mile	Peter Driver, England	29:09.4	E. Zatopek, Czechoslovakia	27:59.2 (1954)
Marathon	Joseph McGhee, Scotland	2h:39:36	James Peters, England	2h:17:39.4 (1954)
RELAY RACES
440 yds	Canada	41.3	University of Texas, USA	40.3 (1954)
1 mile	England	3:11.2	USA National Team	3:08.8 (1952)
HURDLES
120 yds	Keith Gardner, Jamaica	14.2	Richard Attlesey, USA	13.5 (1950)
440 yds	David Lean, Australia	52.3	Charles Moore, USA	51.6 (1952)
FIELD EVENTS
Hop-Step-Jump	Kenneth Wilmshurst, England	50' 1?"	L. Scherbakov, Russia	53' 2?" (1953)
Broad Jump	Kenneth Wilmshurst, England	24' 8?"	Jesse Owens, USA	26' 8?" (1935)
High Jump	Emmanual Ifeajuna, Nigeria	6' 8"	Waiter Davis, USA	6' 11?" (1953)
Pole Vault	Geoffrey Elliott, England	14'	C. Warmerdam, USA	15' 7?" (1942)
Shot Put	John Savidge, England	55' ?"	Parry O'Brien, USA	60' 10" (1954)
Discus	Stephanus du Plessis, S. Africa	169' 7?'	Fortune Gordien, USA	194' 6" (1953)
Javelin	James Achurch, Australia	224' 9?"	Franklin Held, USA	263' 10" (1953)
Hammer	Muhammad Iqbal, Pakistan	181' 8"	Sverre Strandli, Norway	204' 7?" (1953)

VANCOUVER, B.C.

The art of running the mile consists, in essence, of reaching the threshold of unconsciousness at the instant of breasting the tape. It is not an easy process, even in a setpiece race against time, for the body rebels against such agonizing usage and must be disciplined by the spirit and the mind. It is infinitely more difficult in the amphitheater of competition, for then the runner must remain alert and cunning despite the fogs of fatigue and pain; his instinctive calculation of pace must encompass maneuver for position, and he must harbor strength to answer the moves of other men before expending his last reserves in the war of the home stretch.

Few events in sport offer so ultimate a test of human courage and human will and human ability to dare and endure for the simple sake of struggle?classically run, it is a heart-stirring, throat-tightening spectacle. But the world of track has never seen anything quite to equal the "Mile of the Century" which England's Dr. Roger Gilbert Bannister?the tall, pale-skinned explorer of human exhaustion who first crashed the four-minute barrier?won here last Saturday from Australia's world-record holder, John Michael Landy. It will probably not see the like again for a long, long time.

The duel of history's first four-minute milers, high point of the quadrennial British Empire & Commonwealth Games, was the most widely heralded and universally contemplated match footrace of all time. Thirty-two thousand people jostled and screamed while it was run in Vancouver's new Empire Stadium, millions followed it avidly by television. It was also the most ferociously contested of all mile events. Despite the necessity of jockeying on the early turns and of moving up in a field of six other good men, Bannister ran a blazing 3:58.8 and Landy 3:59.6. Thus for the first time two men broke four minutes in the same race. (Though far back in the ruck, five other runners finished under 4:08?Canada's Rich Ferguson in 4:04.6, Northern Ireland's Victor Milligan in 4:05, and both New Zealand's Murray Halberg and England's Ian Boyd in 4:07.2.)

Landy's world record of 3:58, set seven weeks ago in cool, still Nordic twilight at Turku, Finland, still stood when the tape was broken. But runners are truly tested only in races with their peers. When the four-minute mile was taken out of the laboratory and tried on the battlefield, Landy was beaten, man to man, and Roger Bannister reigned again as the giant of modern track.

Seldom has one event so completely overshadowed such a big and colorful sports carnival as this year's Empire Games. The Empire's miniature Olympics, for which Vancouver built its $2,000,000 stadium, a bicycle velodrome and a magnificent swimming pool, would have been notable if only for the rugged, seagirt, mountain-hung beauty amidst which they were held. They were further enlivened by the sight of Vancouver's kilted, scarlet-coated Seaforth Highland Regiment on parade, by the presence of Britain's Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis, and?more exciting yet?of Queen Elizabeth's tall, handsome husband, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

During seven days of competition 20 of 27 games records were cracked in track and field events alone, and England, by virtue of her peerless distance runners, walked off with the lion's share of glory (scoring by unofficial points: England 514-1/2, Australia 363-3/4, Canada 339, South Africa 260-3/4) and served notice on the world of tremendous new strength. Canadians and U.S. tourists alike were startled at the Elizabethan rudeness with which the Englishmen (Oxonians almost to a man, and thus held to be effete) ran their opposition into the ground in races demanding stamina and bottom. They placed one, two, three in the six mile (won by Peter Driver) one, two, three in the three mile (won by amiable, beer-quaffing Chris Chataway, who paced Bannister in the Oxford mile) and one, two, three in the half mile (won by Derek James Neville Johnson).

There were also alarums and sensations. Australia's bicycle team protested English tactics, were rebuffed, withdrew from competition in a scandalous huff, cooled off, and duly re-entered the lists. Vancouver's world champion weightlifter, Doug Hepburn?who stands 5'8", weighs 299 pounds, measures 22 inches around the biceps and wears the look of a Terrible Turk?lifted an aggregate of 1,040 pounds with contemptuous ease while his fellow citizens watched with unsurpassed pride and glee.

Canada's big, beautiful, blond woman shotputter, the Toronto schoolteacher Jackie MacDonald (see page 32), was barred from competition in mid-meet for publicly endorsing Orange Crush. And the big closing-day crowd in the stadium was treated to one of the most gruesome scenes in sports history after England's marathon champion, Jim Peters, entered the track a mile ahead of his field but almost completely unconscious from strain and weariness. Peters fell as he came in sight of the crowd, rose drunkenly, staggered a few steps and fell again (see page 31), until he was lifted to a stretcher and thus disqualified short of victory.

But for all this, nothing in the games remotely approached the tension and drama inherent in the mile. The race developed, in fact, amid an atmosphere much more reminiscent of a heavyweight championship fight than a contest of amateurs on the track. This was not unjustified; it was obvious from the beginning that Bannister and Landy would be engaged in a sort of gladiatorial combat, a duel of endurance in which no two other men who ever lived could even have engaged.