A pioneer passes

Quietly, in the way he did everything, one of the signature athletes of the 20th century passed the other day. Maybe you heard about it, even though he was English and we are a devoutly provincial society here in America. Likely you didn't.

After all, it's been 64 years since Sir Roger Bannister did what many believed could never be done.

The four-minute mile is such a routine milepost anymore that it almost doesn't count as one, so it's hard to understand, here in 2018, what a man-walking-on-the-moon aura it once possessed. Serious people with serious credentials believed it couldn't be done without a man's heart bursting in his chest. There are limits to human achievement, those people believed, and a human being running a mile in four minutes was one of them.

And then, on a damp, breezy May afternoon on a cinder track off Iffley Road in Oxford, England, a gangly young medical student blew that notion to shards.

Paced by two of his friends and teammates, Christopher Chataway and Chris Brasher, Bannister, all elbows and knees, unspooled his devastating kick across the last 200 meters and flew through the tape in 3:59.4, emptying his tank so completely that he immediately collapsed in the arms of his coaches. He was 25 years old, and he would not get much older before he would walk away from competitive running. Not long after beating John Landy in an epic duel three months after making history -- and two months after Landy became the second man to break four minutes in the mile -- Bannister retired from athletics to pursue his medical career.

That, too, seems quaint here in 2018, when athletes  make their sport a profession. True amateurs are a rarity in the Olympic sports these days; in Bannister's day, they were the rule. It makes what he did even more astounding.

Consider: He achieved one of the iconic milestones in athletic history while training part-time, on a cinder track, wearing spikes that resembled today's running shoes the way an oxcart resembles a Tesla. And he did it only by pushing himself literally to the edge of consciousness.

Again, it's hard to fathom in 2018 how this made headlines all over the world. It was, it seems, of a piece with the times, when almost daily those old assumptions about human limits were being swept away.

Roger Bannister's time, after all, saw Chuck Yeager break the sound barrier. It saw Dr. Jonas Salk discover a polio vaccine. Seven years after Bannister's feat, first the Russians and then the Americans launched a human being into space and brought him back safely; 15 years after that breezy day along Iffley Road, human beings walked on the moon.

A man running a mile in less than four minutes?

Just another piece of all that.