Roger Bannister

After his work, Bannister took the train from London to Oxford. On the train he met Franz Stampfl, who coached Bannister's teammate Chris Brasher. Stampfl told Bannister that despite the weather, he should give it his best try, saying, according to Deford, "If you don't take this opportunity, you may never forgive yourself." Bannister remained undecided through lunch and teatime later that day. As the race began at the Iffley Road track in Oxford, only about 1,100 spectators had showed up. Among them were Bannister's parents, who had been told by a friend that something special might happen that day.

As Bannister warmed up on the track, he kept looking toward the church of St. John the Evangelist, where a flag flying straight out above the steeple showed the strength of the wind. A few minutes before the race started at 6:10 p.m., the flag began to drop, and Bannister told himself that if everyone in characteristically rainy and windy England waited for good weather before doing anything, nothing would ever be done. He told Chataway and Brasher he was going to make the attempt on the record.

The gun sounded, and the runners took off. Brasher was in the lead until the end of the third lap, when Chataway took over the pace. On the backstretch Bannister passed him, moving ahead of all the other runners, into a new pace, never run before. On the stretch, a gust of wind pushed him sideways, stealing valuable fractions of seconds, but Bannister kept going, hitting the tape at 3:59.4. According to Nelson and Quercetani, he later said of those last few seconds of the race, "I felt that the moment of a lifetime had come. There was no pain, only a great utility of movement and aim. The world seemed to stand still or did not exist, the only reality was the next two hundred yards of track under my feet." As he crossed over the finish line, he was so spent that he collapsed, almost passing out.

The crowd went wild, rushing onto the track and surrounding Bannister. A report in the London Times on the following day noted, "There was a scene of the wildest excitement—and what miserable spectators they would have been if they had not waved their programmes, shouted, even jumped in the air a little."