According to legend, Roger Bannister was the first human being to run a mile in under four minutes. But if we think about this for even half a second, we realize it’s a completely absurd story. Look at the average person. They weigh roughly three hundred pounds and couldn’t run fast enough to catch a bag of Doritos falling off their dresser. Even in my more athletic days (back when I swam a mile without stopping, for instance) I never ran a mile faster than about ten minutes…and we’re supposed to believe that someone ran it in under four? In fact, I live in Colorado Springs which has the US Olympic Training Center, and I’ve never seen anyone run a mile in under four minutes. Several of my coworkers run religiously (they hold to the myth, you see), and I’ve never seen them run a mile under four minutes. Surely, if it were true that Roger Bannister did it, it wouldn’t be so hard for the average person to accomplish.
So how do we explain this? Well, we grew up reading comic books about Superman. And Roger Bannister is nothing more than a myth of Superman. See, Superman could run faster than a speeding bullet (and he could, therefore, run a mile in under four minutes). Because people looked up to Superman and longed to be like Superman, we created the myth of Roger Bannister. To make it more exotic, we pretended he was born in England (all good 20th Century myths require an Englishman. James Bond. Any questions? Didn’t think so.)
So what about the supposed evidence? Well, it’s all hearsay. None of us were there. Yes, the event supposedly occurred in front of thousands of witnesses, but none of them had stopwatches. And really, all you needed was to pay off the one person with a stopwatch who set the “official” time. Now tell me, isn’t it more likely that that one guy was paid off to lie than it is to think that Roger Bannister could actually run a mile in under a minute? And look at how the legend profligates to this day, with many athletes claiming to be able to do it themselves. (And we’ve seen how athletes lie when it suits them: ex. O.J. Simpson. Again, I rest my case.) Even if I was there and saw Bannister run the mile in under four minutes it wouldn’t prove he actually did. I would take the more likely truth that my stopwatch was flawed.
After all, the myth of Roger Bannister causes us to hope Superman is real. Those who believe in Bannister, frankly, could believe in anything. That’s what makes them so scary.