Running News Daily

John Landy has died at age 91

John Landy, a scholarly Australian who became the second man, after Roger Bannister of England, to run the mile in under four minutes, and who later dueled Bannister in a race that became known as the Mile of the Century, died on Thursday at his home in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia. He was 91.

His death was reported by the country’s main public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

For as long as races were measured in time, running a mile in less than four minutes had remained one of humankind’s seemingly unbreachable barriers. But by 1954, three of the world’s greatest runners — Landy, Bannister and Wes Santee of the United States — had been edging closer to that mark and appeared ready to shatter it.

All three faced obstacles: Landy, at just over 5-foot-11 and 150 pounds, was running on slower grass tracks in Australia; Bannister was deep into medical studies at Oxford; and Santee had to run three relays for the University of Kansas in almost every meet.

Bannister reached four minutes first, running a mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds on May 6, 1954, in Oxford. Not to be outdone, Landy, who graduated from Melbourne University that year with a degree in agricultural science, headed for Europe and its faster tracks.

On June 21 — 46 days after Bannister’s historic race — Landy lowered the world record even more, to 3:57.9, in Turku, Finland. (According to the timing rules of the day, which called for mile records to be listed in fifths rather than tenths of a second, the time was listed as 3:58.0; it is now recognized as 3:57.9, the actual time recorded by four timers.)

As Landy saw it, he and Bannister had simply done the inevitable. “Four minutes was not a psychological barrier,” he said. “Someone was going to break it. If there hadn’t been a war, it would have fallen 10 years earlier.”

Landy’s record would last three years; it was broken in 1957 by Derek Ibbotson of England, who ran 3:57.2. (The current record is 3:43.13, run by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco.)