[BITList] The first Sub-Four Minute Mile and The first London marathon

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2017-04-23



Brasher,  Christopher William  [Chris]  (1928-2003), athlete, journalist, and businessman, was born on 21 August 1928 in Georgetown, British Guiana, the son of William Kenneth Brasher, a Colonial Office engineer, and his wife, Katie Howe Brasher. His family moved to Jerusalem and then, when Brasher was seven years old, to England. He was educated at Oakley Hall preparatory school, Rugby School, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied geology. His interest in athletics flourished at Cambridge, where he specialized in middle- and long-distance track events, and represented both the university and the Achilles Club. He gained his athletics blue, and performed well at the 1951 world student games in Luxembourg, winning the gold medal in the 5000 metres and the silver medal in the 1500 metres. He also gained experience in international travel and outdoor exploration while at Cambridge, working as a geologist in two Arctic expeditions, to Baffin Island in 1948, and to Spitsbergen in 1949.

On graduation in 1951 Brasher joined Mobil Oil as a management trainee, while also pursuing his promising athletics career. He concentrated on the 3000 metre steeplechase for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, coming eleventh in the final. With a generous leave allowance from Mobil, he developed a more thorough approach to training, particularly through working with the Austrian coach Franz Stampfl. This relationship, and his links with fellow Achilles Club athletes Roger Bannister and Christopher Chataway, led Brasher to be part of the British attempt at the first sub-four minute mile. Stampfl worked with Brasher and Chataway on their pace-making skills that were to become central to Bannister's attempt on the record. In June 1953 Brasher paced Bannister in a race at Motspur Park, but Bannister's time of 4 minutes 2 seconds (which would have been a new British record) was disallowed after Brasher merely ran on the spot for the penultimate lap (thus contravening the British Amateur Athletic Board's rule that no athlete was supposed to enter a race unless he intended to complete it and try to win it). For the rest of 1953 and into 1954 the pair, with Chataway and sometimes supervised by Stampfl, trained in London, while in December 1953 Brasher took Bannister to Scotland on a climbing holiday to break the monotony of their track work. This work paid off on 6 May 1954 in an Oxford University  Amateur Athletics Association meeting at the Iffley Road track in Oxford. Working to a careful plan, Brasher took the pace for the first half mile, reaching that mark in 1 minute 58.2 seconds before passing the pace to Chataway. Bannister won the race in the record time of 3 minutes 59.4 seconds and subsequently stressed Brasher's significance in laying the foundation for the record: 'We seemed to be going so slowly. Impatiently, I shouted "faster". But Brasher kept his head and did not change the pace ... He made success possible'  (Bannister, 165). Brasher himself later confessed that while his main role was as pace-setter for Bannister, he had dreamed of rewriting the script and trying to win the race. He also claimed that, despite the greatness of Bannister's success, he felt like 'a nonentity, a fraud ... My one moment of fame, and I'd achieved it riding on somebody else's back'  (The Independent).

After this race Brasher switched back to the 3000 metre steeplechase as his main event. He represented England at the 1954 British empire and Commonwealth games in Vancouver, and began to make more of a mark in 1955 and 1956, in both domestic and international meetings, consistently being placed second behind John Disley. He was selected for the 3000 metre steeplechase in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and, despite being ranked behind both Disley and Eric Shirley, approached it as scientifically as he could, ensuring that he had the lightest spikes available, having contact lenses made in case of rain, and training with Stampfl in Australia to help his acclimatization. He also drew on his sense of determination: as Chataway said of him, 'He is five per cent ability and ninety-five per cent guts'  (Rowland). He won the final in 8 minutes 41.2 seconds, breaking both the Olympic and the British record in the process, and winning Great Britain's first Olympic men's track gold medal since the Berlin Olympics of 1936. However, his moment of glory was delayed as the race officials claimed that he had obstructed the Norwegian runner Ernst Larsen during the race. Brasher lodged an appeal, which was backed by Larsen and a number of other competitors, and he had his victory confirmed three hours after breaking the tape. The delay meant that the medal ceremony took place on the following day. Brasher filled some of the time with a celebratory lunch with some British journalists, and claimed that he received his medal 'blind drunk, totally blotto, with an asinine grin on my face ... breathing gin fumes over the French member of the International Olympic Committee'  (The Independent).

Brasher retired from track athletics after the Melbourne Olympics, and in 1957 he left Mobil to join The Observer as sports editor, a post he held until 1961, when he went freelance. On 28 April 1959 he married Shirley Juliet Bloomer, a 24-year-old championship tennis player, and daughter of Arthur Hugh Bloomer, garage proprietor. They had a son and two daughters. He maintained his interest in walking and mountaineering, taking part in Sir John Hunt's expedition to Karakoram in 1962, and later became enthusiastic about the Scandinavian sport of cross-country compass running, which he helped to popularize under the name of orienteering in the UK, setting up the British Orienteering Federation in 1966. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he distinguished himself as a journalist, through his work at the BBC on such reportage programmes as Tonight and Man Alive, his columns for The Observer, and his published diaries of the Olympic Games of 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972. In all of these he was able to combine his knowledge of sport with an eye for the social and political changes that were taking place in and around the Olympic movement. His disgust at the more nationalistic elements of the games, and later at the prevalence of performance-enhancing drugs, led him to some scathing attacks on the movement. In 1968, for example, he likened his involvement with the Olympics to a 'love affair ... with this woman who transforms pure physical effort into an experience of spiritual beauty', but concluded that '[n]ow she is a raddled old tart'  (Rowland). His journalism won him much praise, and he was voted British sports journalist of the year in 1968.

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s Brasher's multitalented character as 'a buccaneer of the second Elizabethan age'  (The Observer) came to the fore, as he extended the range of activities in which he was involved. He was head of general features at BBC Television from 1969 until 1972, and diversified into business in 1971 by setting up the Sweat Shop in Twickenham with his former track rival John Disley, as a supplier for runners and orienteers. This later became a successful chain. The shop acted as a distributor for a number of specialized athletics products, including Fleetfoot shoes, and Brasher designed a new lightweight walking boot, known as the Brasher Boot. Alongside these business ventures, which were later to make him a millionaire when he sold the Fleetfoot franchise to Reebok, he maintained his journalism, working as a freelance in both print and broadcast media, for which he was given his second British sports journalist of the year award, in 1976. He also built on his deep love of outdoor recreation in this period by organizing walks, races, and expeditions both in the UK and abroad, and by setting up and part funding lobbying organizations to protect tracts of countryside. His lobbying, investment, and fund-raising activities helped to protect parts of Snowdonia from development, while his work in Scotland with the John Muir Trust (founded in 1983) established a model of a community-based conservation organization.

Despite these achievements Brasher's most notable organizational and commercial triumph of this period came in 1981, when he organized the first London marathon. He had enjoyed social running since his retirement from the track, particularly with clubs such as his local club, the Petersham-based Ranelagh Harriers, and he ran the New York city marathon in 1979. He was impressed with the scale of the race, and with the fact that it welcomed runners of all abilities, ages, and backgrounds, thus diluting the marathon's elite sporting reputation and making it a civic, multicultural occasion. Returning to London, he wrote passionately on the race in his column in The Observer:

Last Sunday millions of us saw a vision of the human race happy and united, willing their fellow human beings to a pointless but wonderful victory over mental doubts and bodily frailty. I wonder whether London could stage such a festival. (Bryant, 55)
At a time of rising interest in personal fitness Brasher saw the mass marathon as 'the great suburban Everest'  (ibid., 13) and, working with Disley again, set about lobbying the political and police authorities at home for a London marathon. After some resistance, and with Brasher working hard to guarantee commercial sponsorship from Gillette so that the Greater London council did not have to pay for the race, the inaugural London marathon took place in March 1981. Brasher, aged fifty-two, completed the course in 2 hours 56 minutes. The success of the first race, which made a surplus of £12,000, helped to lay the foundation for one of the world's most popular marathons, and Brasher remained involved with its organization for over a decade. This involvement was, at times, controversial, most notably over allegations that Brasher and Disley were using the marathon to promote their sports shoe business. In 1991 the journalist Duncan Campbell wrote this story up, and it was featured in the New Statesman and on a Channel 4 television documentary. Brasher and Disley contested the story, and were awarded substantial damages when the assertions were taken back after a four-year legal battle.

Brasher maintained his various interests throughout the 1990s and into the new century. He reported on the 1992 Barcelona Olympics for the Sunday Times, although his antipathy towards many aspects of the games kept him away from Atlanta in 1996. His business interests led him to serve as Reebok UK's chairman from 1992 until 1994, and he continued to lobby for the preservation of open spaces, helping to inaugurate the Petersham Trust. He also gained many honours in this period, including the golden boot (1990) and the golden eagle (1999) from the Outdoor Writers' Association, the Ron Pickering award for services to British athletics (2002), and a sports industry lifetime achievement award (2003). He was made CBE in 1996, having turned down a state honour during Margaret Thatcher's premiership in protest at her lack of investment in sport. He died of cancer on 28 February 2003 at his home, the White House, Chaddleworth, Berkshire, and was survived by his wife and their three children. There was a period of silence at the start of that year's London marathon as a mark of respect.

Martin Polley 

Sources  I. Buchanan, British Olympians: a hundred years of gold medallists (1992) + Daily Telegraph (1 March 2003) + The Guardian (1 March 2003) + The Independent (1 March 2003) + The Times (1 March 2003); (5 March 2003); (6 March 2003); (10 March 2003); (14 March 2003); (5 May 2003) + The Observer (2 March 2003) + The Scotsman (12 March 2003) + R. Bannister, The first four minutes (2004) + J. Bryant, The London Marathon: the history of the greatest race on earth (2006) + WW (2003) + S. Rowland, A Chris Brasher miscellany, Ranelagh Harriers, www.ranelagh-harriers.com/chrisb_msc.html + m. cert. + d. cert.
Archives  FILM BFINA, sports footage
Likenesses  photographs, 1950-2001, Empics, Nottingham · photographs, 1953-6, Getty Images, London · photograph, 1954, Central Press, Hulton Getty; repro. in J. Huntingdon-Whiteley, The book of British sporting heroes (1998), 34 · photographs, 1954-6, Popperfoto, Northampton [see illus.] · photographs, 1959-91, Rex Features, London · three photographs, 1994, Photoshot, London · B. Aldrich, resin-coated bromide print, 1995, NPG · three photographs, 2001-2, Camera Press, London · obituary photographs




========================================================================
©    Oxford     University    Press,    2004.    See     legal    notice:
http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/legal/

We hope you have enjoyed this Life of The Day, but if you do wish to stop
receiving   these   messages,   please   EITHER   send   a   message   to
LISTSERV at WEBBER.UK.HUB.OUP.COM with

signoff ODNBLIFEOFTHEDAY-L

in the body (not the subject line) of the message

OR

send an  email to  epm-oxforddnb at oup.com, asking us  to stop  sending you
these messages.