Sir Chris Chataway - Forever associated with a breezy day in May 1954

Sir Roger Bannister always reckoned that the friend who followed him across the line into sporting immortality had the body of a fighter rather than a runner.

“Chataway had a strength and power in his chest and shoulders that tempted one to suggest that he would be more at home in the boxing ring than on the running track,” Sir Roger once observed. “Yet his potential as a three miler was as great as any athlete in the world.”

Sir Chris Chataway, who died on Sunday, aged 82, had to draw heavily on all his fighting spirit in a two-and-a-half year battle with cancer.

It was the same dauntless spirit that allowed him to break the world 5,000 metres record and thus become the first winner of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award in 1954 — the year with which he will forever be associated, most widely for a run on a blustery Oxford afternoon in which he did not finish first.

For Sir Chris was the pacemaker, along with the late Chris Brasher, who helped Sir Roger become the first person run a mile in under four minutes, when history was made at the Iffley Road track 60 years ago.

A world-class competitor from the half-mile to the half marathon, it is a measure of his fame and popularity that in 1954 he received the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ahead of Sir Roger, who was there to present him with the trophy.

Sir Chris went on to forge careers on television, reading ITN’s first bulletin in 1955, and as a politician, serving as a minister in Edward Heath’s Conservative government, before moving into banking and later becoming chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority.

But he cheerfully accepted for all that he subsequently achieved, that he was destined to be remembered as the runner who set the pace for Sir Roger.

Chris Brasher, who had led the first two-and-a-half laps, had said: “The four-minute mile was Bannister’s achievement really. “Roger was extraordinarily generous after the event, the way he said it was a team effort, but it wasn’t really, it was a one man effort.

“That is why I pushed myself so hard at the Melbourne Olympics in the steeplechase. I wanted and needed to prove something to myself.”

Thankfully, most of the sporting world disagreed, recognising that it would be an injustice to diminish the role of the two Christophers in the first sub-four-minute mile to that of bit parts.

In his book The First Four Minutes, Sir Roger’s description of the moment of triumph says it all. “The announcement came — ‘Result of one mile...time, three minutes’ — the rest lost in the roar of excitement.

“I grabbed Brasher and Chataway, and together we scampered round the track in a burst of spontaneous joy. We had done it — the three of us.

“We shared a place where no man had yet ventured — secure for all time, however fast men might run miles in the future.

“We had done it where we wanted, when we wanted, how we wanted, in our first attempt of the year.

“In the wonderful joy my pain was forgotten and I wanted to prolong those precious moments of realisation.”

Sixty years later, Sir Roger, who lives in Oxford, remembered his late friend.

“He was one of my closest friends for more than half a century so I will remember him with great affection. My thoughts go to his widow Carola and the rest of his family.

“He was, of course, known for his running, but it should not be forgotten that he had other careers as well.

“He excelled in these other fields but our friendship involved our run together.

“We were companions in good times and in bad times and I shall remember all the fun we shared together.

“He was a family man and all those he knew were very fond of him. All his friends, I am sure, will miss him greatly.”

Sir Chris was born in Chelsea on January 31, 1931 and spent much of his childhood in Sudan, where his father was an official. Educated at Sherborne School, in Dorset, he won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, to read PPE.

In his first term he won a cross-country Blue, succeeding Bannister as president of the Oxford University Athletic Club.

Early in 1952 he cut Bannister’s Oxford mile record to four minutes, 10.2 seconds, later that year knocking five seconds off the British all-comers’ two-mile record.

Chataway represented Britain in the 1952 Olympic Games, when a trip at the last bend dashed his hopes of winning the 5,000m.

In his last year at Oxford, in the Varsity Match, he cut his best for the mile to 4.08.4, then the third-fastest time by a Briton.

Chataway had first met Bannister when the latter was doing his postgraduate work at Merton College.

In his book The Perfect Mile, Neal Bascomb, describes their early relationship.

“Chataway had considered the miler a distant senior figure, much as one viewed an Oxford don.

“Bannister was not known for visiting the Iffley Road track often, and initially he gave Chataway the impression that he never trained, despite rumours that Bannister was often seen running on distant playing fields around Oxford.

“Only after Chataway roomed with the miler in Helsinki did he become friends with Bannister and learn how seriously he took his running efforts.”

It was a time, whether athletes liked it or not, when the four-minute mile had become another Everest, a kind of challenge to the human spirit.

“It was a barrier that seemed to defy all attempts to break it — an irksome reminder that man’s striving might be in vain,” Sir Roger would recall.

The Oxford University versus AAA race became the first opportunity of the year to attack the four-minute barrier, with the help of the two men who at Sir Roger’s insistence were to share his place in history.

Strong winds meant Sir Roger had feared the bid in May 1954 might not go ahead, until he met up with his friend.

“In the afternoon I called on Chris Chataway,” recalled Sir Roger.

“At that moment the sun was shining, and he lay stretched on a window seat. He smiled and said, just as I knew he would, ‘the day could be a lot worse, couldn’t it? Just now it’s fine. The forecast says the wind may drop towards evening. Let’s not decide until five o’clock.’.”

Brasher took the lead when the race finally did get under way. On the bend, having passed the half mile in 1.58, Chataway went into the lead.

With his world-class endurance finally giving out, he held the lead until Bannister swept past him on the outside at the beginning of the back straight, 300 yards from the finish.

At the end Bannister was barely conscious and overwhelmed with pain. When he recovered sufficiently to stand, he hurried towards Chataway and Brasher and the three took a victory trot around the track.

As a record-breaker, people had loved the way Chataway still enjoyed a cigar.

“We were told that we would get stale and exhausted if we trained too much, so I didn’t,” he recalled. “I ran three or four times per week and was still smoking and drinking like other young men at the time. “ Despite all this he was still running well into his seventies.

“I think I get more pleasure running slowly now than I ever did running fast in my twenties,” he had said. “It is pure enjoyment, there is no stress, no agony.”

When asked why the moment and magic of the race has endured, Sir Chris put it down to the last flowering of amateurism.

“It was our lifestyle that enchanted the world,” he once reflected. “They fell in love with the idea that running was just a part of our lives. We were the last flicker of the illusion that world athletics might still be dominated by young undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge.

“Along with that there was the seductive mathematical appeal of four laps and four minutes, the hypnotism of round numbers.

“Put that into an era of barrier-breaking with Everest, the sound barrier and the talk of a new Elizabethan age, and you begin to glimpse why it has endured.”

But it also came down to the trio of remarkable personalities, with only one now remaining, who epitomised a golden generation of athletes that strove to prove the British were still a race of world beaters.