Sir Roger Bannister: The reason sport is attractive to many of the general public, not to some intellectuals, is that it’s filled with reversals. What you think may happen doesn’t happen. A champion is beaten, an unknown becomes a champion, and I had set my mind on winning the 1500-meter gold medal in Helsinki in 1952. My ambition was always to do, say, what Lovelock had done, and win a gold medal. And, it all came disastrously wrong when I came fourth instead of winning. The reasons why I came fourth are unimportant. I mean, it was a reorganization of the pattern of the races, and my very slender training let me down. I did not have the capacity to recover quickly, but still it doesn’t matter. Instead of retiring in order to devote myself to medicine, I decided to go on for another two years while I was still a student, working clinically in London, and I did that. The targets that would have justified this failure, as I saw it, were the Commonwealth Games, or Empire Games as they were then called. This was a race in Vancouver against John Landy or Oliver Reynolds. But Landy was the most famous.