Completely off pace
Bannister's four-minute mile, whose 50th anniversary is being hailed 
week, actually ruined world athletics
Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile has been hailed as the defining moment in British sporting history. It has become such an iconic event that the 50th anniversary on Thursday is being celebrated with the sort of reverence previously reserved for royal occasions. Yet Bannister's run is one of the worst things that ever happened to athletics. Far from being an admirable feat, it was cosy, conniving and dishonest. Its seminal contribution to sport has been to ruin middle-distance running worldwide.
The worst thing about the first sub-four was the pacemaking. It nurtured the belief that was the only way to race middle distances - which persists to day. There's nothing wrong with peers agreeing to pace one another, as long as everyone is trying to win. Paid pacemakers are ruining athletics, because they are effectively being paid to lose. How can be ethical competition?
Their forerunners were Olympic athletes Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, red-carpeting for Bannister.They paced him for close to three-and-a-half of the four-lap race. They weren't being paid, but they provided the template for the disastrous situation we have now. The rules of the International Association of Athletics Federations used to be very clear on this: everyone in the race should be there to try and win - "honest competition". Pacemakers do not fulfil that criterion. The "honest competition" rule has since been quietly dropped by the IAAF, and pacemakers drop out and get handsomely paid for their services. But the ethical question remains.
In 1953, the year before the first sub-four, Bannister had a rehearsal. Paced by another international runner for two-and-a-half laps, he caught Brasher, who had been dawdling a lap behind waiting to pick up and pace Bannister over the final lap. Bannister recorded 4min 2sec, but the Amateur Athletic Association - to their credit - refused to recognise the time as valid for British record purposes, claiming "manipulation'.
The tactic was finessed the following year at the Oxford University AC v AAA match at Iffley Road, and history was made - but at a heavy price. Unfortunately, it has become an indispensable tool for generations of middle-distance runners, to the extent that we have had Hicham El Guerrouj, the leading middle-distance runner of his generation, being paced in two world championships, 1999 and 2001, and in the 2000 Olympic games. It could be argued that countries "new" to athletics are most likely to employ pacemaking in championships. El Guerrouj is one of the nicest people you could meet: personable, intelligent, accessible. Yet there was widespread satisfaction when his paced tactics went awry in Sydney, and he folded in the final straight of the Olympic 1,500m, conceding victory to Kenya's Noah Ngeny.
I make no excuses for asking him, when he was in tears at the post-race press conference, why he thought it necessary to be paced in an Olympic final. He mumbled something about it being a decision of the Moroccan federation. Whatever the case, he was complicit in a tactic that demeans the Olympics, athletic competition and competitors. But most of all, it demeans El Guerrouj. Yet he doesn't seem to think he's doing anything wrong.
And why would he? Because the nation that gave the world the mile race, whose athletes broke the four-minute mile, and which produced Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett - men who changed the nature of international athletics - does it. So why can't everybody else?
The antidote for malaise lies elsewhere in the sport's history, and it is certainly not the (highly unlikely) claim, made last weekend, that someone ran sub-four in 1770. The defining moment of 20th-century middle-distance running didn't occur in Oxford on May 6 1954; it came in the Queen Elizabeth II stadium in Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 2 1974. And the genius to whom we should all be paying homage is not Roger Bannister but Filbert Bayi of Tanzania.
When Bayi dared to run away from the field in the Commonwealth games 1,500m final in 1974, he set an example for the event that has done so much to define international athletics throughout the century-and-a-half of organised running. Bayi opened with a lap of 54.9sec, and just kept going. New Zealand's John Walker was catching Bayi throughout the last lap, and was barely a metre behind on the final bend. In those circumstances, 99 times out of 100, the pursuer bursts past to victory. But with barely a backward glance, Bayi stretched away again. He won in 3min 32.2sec, breaking the world record by 0.9sec. And he had run every step of the way in front. That is class.
Bayi's performance is an indictment of every middle-distance runner who thinks that they have to be paced to turn in a decent time. The film of his run should be compulsory viewing for every aspiring middle-distance runner. Unfortunately, all they'll be seeing week will be reruns of that flickering film of three white-vested establishment figures visiting another British sporting disaster on the world.
· Pat Butcher's book, The Perfect Distance - Ovett & Coe: The Record Breaking Rivalry, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on July 29