It was the Everest of athletics, but half a centrury ago it was conquered by a junior doctor. As the anniversary approaches of one of the most remarkable runs in history, Nick Morrison talks to the first man to break the four-minute mile, Sir Roger Bannister.

PANDEMONIUM broke out even before all the runners had crossed the line. The crowd stampeded onto the track, unable to contain their excitement, surrounding and submerging the exhausted athletes. Next to the finishing line, the timekeepers conferred: three of them had to agree on the time for it to be official. Two minutes later, they handed a piece of paper to the race announcer, Norris McWhirter.

Amid rising anticipation, McWhirter stepped up to the microphone. Using a tone he had practised the previous night, and trying to keep his voice from breaking, he announced the result of the ninth event of the evening, the one mile. As his words came over the loudspeakers, the mayhem on the track was silenced.

"The time is three... " he said. The rest was drowned out by cheers, but the crowd had heard the only bit that mattered. After a century of endeavour, and despite a belief it was beyond the limits of human exertion, sport's Holy Grail, the four-minute mile barrier, had been broken by a junior doctor, Roger Bannister. It was May 6, 1953.

Now Sir Roger, the then 25-year-old had collapsed from exhaustion after the race and it was some time before he could stand to take the plaudits from the crowd. But it was not until the next day that the enormity of his achievement began to sink in. Along with Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, his training partners and pacemakers in that historic race at Oxford's Iffley Road track, he went out after the race to celebrate, still not quite realising the impact of what they had just done.

"The three of us had been to a nightclub with our partners, and we got the morning papers at 3am and then we realised something had happened," he recalls. "We ended up the next day at my home and we trekked up to Harrow Hill, and looking out you could see the whole of London. We were talking about what we would do now, and we all had our plans, and very temporarily the whole world was at our feet. We felt we could do anything."

While records can be broken and even gold medals can be forgotten, Sir Roger will always be the first to break four minutes. Even though hundreds have followed him through that barrier, his place in athletics history is unassailable.

But it was a challenge he very nearly did not take, and even then it was only incidental to his main goal, beating John Landy, the gifted Australian runner.

Bannister had intended to retire from running after the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, when he had been favourite for gold in the 1500 metres. But his disappointment at finishing fourth spurred him to continue, and in a country still emerging from the austerity of the war years, breaking the four-minute barrier captured the hearts in the same way the race to reach the South Pole had 40 years earlier.

"I felt I had rather let everybody down and so was really determined to get to the winning position in future, and the four-minute mile lay in the way of that," he says. Strange as it sounds now, for Bannister the four-minute barrier was more a means to an end.

"What was more important, athletically speaking, was meeting John Landy in Vancouver in a competitive race. If I hadn't beaten Landy, I think the four-minute mile would have been rather a hollow victory. It had been a secondary issue, but then it was pushed into the forefront: if I didn't do it, John Landy would."

Bannister had competed at Helsinki while still a student at Oxford University, and it was this experience which helped inspire him, turning a gifted runner into a world-beater.

"I had always run quite a bit, just to get places quickly. When I was younger I lived on the top of a hill and the school was at the top of a hill on the other side of town, so I used to run up the hill," he says.

"At university, I was in an environment of largely ex-servicemen, and if we had been three or four years older, we might have been dead. There was this feeling among those from school that we had to do something to prove ourselves."

Bannister combined his running with training to be a doctor, fitting in 30 minutes a day before he went to work. It was far removed from today's professional athletes, but then his training methods were also somewhat unusual.

"My plan was to run repeatedly to exhaustion several times during the session, so that I was improving both my stamina and my capacity to run faster. This was the formula that I used and it did work, but I needed to recover after each race. If you run two hours a day or four hours a day you can recover more quickly."

But when it came to that historic race, Bannister very nearly did not attempt the record. Strong winds meant he thought his prospects of breaking four minutes were slim, but at the last minute the wind dropped, although even then he thought it was only 50-50. "I thought I would not forgive myself if we didn't take that chance, because I might never get it again," he says.

He says the wind cost him about a second a lap, but his time of 3:59.4 took two seconds off the previous record. Seven weeks later, Landy ran 3:58, a second-and-a-half quicker. Bannister's record had stood for less than 50 days.

After setting his record, and then beating Landy in Vancouver in the Empire Games, Bannister retired from athletics and concentrated on medicine. Running had never been more than a passionate hobby for him, but still he found there were some in the medical profession who held his position as a national figure against him.

As a result, he had to cut himself off from the sport altogether. "I had to make up for it," he says, even though it sounds bizarre to have to make up for making history. "I put it to one side for a long time and started something that was really difficult and still fascinates me."

Bannister became a respected neurologist, and in 1975 was knighted for services to both medicine and sport. He embarked on a third career in 1985, when he became head of an Oxford college, retiring 11 years ago. Now 75, he lives with his wife Moyra in Oxford, just a short distance from the Iffley Road track.

He still ran, although just for fun, until a car crash in 1975 left him with a fractured ankle. "It wasn't my fault", he says. "A driver ran across the intersection." He does play golf, though, but doesn't approach it with the same determination as he did the four-minute mile.

"I'm highly uncompetitive. I have been through all that. My wife might say different, but it doesn't worry me if I win or lose the odd game. Once you have been through it, you see the shallowness of it all," he says.

The anniversary, and a revised edition of his acclaimed book on the four-minute mile, provide an opportunity to reminisce, but otherwise he says he doesn't think about it too much. He appreciates the chance it has given him to meet and talk to people across the world, but he's too modest to get carried away.

"I didn't have any particular talents. I had some skill as a runner, but it's not as difficult as a Jonny Wilkinson drop goal or Brian Lara scoring 400," he insists. But even amidst his natural humility, he keeps a special place for the four-minute mile. "It was a very intense experience, but it's tucked away in the back of my brain for when I choose to think about it in detail."

* The First Four Minutes by Sir Roger Bannister (Sutton Publishing, £7.99).