His father, William, was managing director of Associated Newspapers and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, Norris and Ross moved into sports journalism, Ross becoming the Star’s rugby and tennis correspondent while Norris was for 16 years athletics correspondent of the Observer, and also covered every Olympics from Rome (1960) to Munich (1972) for the BBC. He competed for Great Britain against Norway in 1951, winning the 100 and 200 metres. Certainly, he fought against, rather than played footsie with fascism, though his later rightwing politics were such as to make anyone to the left of Norman Tebbit seek a cold compress.Īfter serving on minesweepers in the Pacific in the war, McWhirter went to Trinity College, Oxford where, apart from graduating in international relations and economics, and then taking an MA in law, he became an athlete, running the 100 yards in under 10 seconds. Tory MP Julian Lewis argued Baddiel’s remarks were “disgraceful”, not least because McWhirter was a second world war veteran. The suggestion that McWhirter was a fascist outraged his admirers. “Was he a brownshirt with Mosley or whatever they were called?” Davies asked, referring to Oswald Mosley, the 1930s leader of the British Union of Fascists. During it, Baddiel described the Freedom Association as a “slightly posher version of the BNP”. We were reminded of this in September when Katie Hopkins announced her intentions to tour the country’s schools to talk to teenagers about the importance of owning their opinions.īaddiel’s fascination with McWhirter, though, got him into trouble that same year when the BBC was compelled to apologise for a conversation with Alan Davies on Radio 5 Live. They were expecting to delight in his knowledge of arcane stats, only to hear him blether for 45 minutes about the Freedom Association, the grassroots rightwing political organisation he co-founded in 1975. It was inspired by a day in 1978 at Baddiels’ school when the teenage boys turned up for a talk by McWhirter. Seven years after his death in 2004, McWhirter briefly returned to public consciousness when comedian David Baddiel did a show for Sky called The Norris McWhirter Chronicles, in which Alistair McGowan played the title role. We will never see his like again, not because the world doesn’t teem with libertarian ideologues, nor with grown men who know too much about the minutiae of stuff but because combining these two disciplines successfully in public seems beyond our wit in 2017. "Just consider the alternatives - that is the way I look at it," he added.McWhirter with Roy Castle on Record Breakers. "I am being well looked after and I don't intend to let it interfere - as much as I can," he told the BBC in 2014. The condition progressively damages part of the brain over time and is one Bannister was familiar with, even before he was first diagnosed a few years ago, from his lengthy career as neurologist. By then Bannister was having trouble walking, let alone running, after revealing he was suffering from Parkinson's disease. The black-leather pair of shoes sold for £266,500 in September 2015 - about $409,000 at the exchange rate at the time. But Bannister's achievement has continued to inspire athletics enthusiasts, with the shoes he wore to break the four-minute barrier selling for a record. It is very difficult to break records during Olympic competition, but winning races was better than holding world records." The current one-mile record has since 1999 been held by Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj with a time of 3:43.13 secs. "Vancouver was the pinnacle of my athletics career. "I think that racing in the Olympics and Commonwealths is more important than breaking records," Bannister said in 2014. But despite being famed for breaking the four-minute barrier, Bannister said he felt a greater sense of achievement winning gold at the 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, beating his great rival Australian John Landy in a race later dubbed the "Miracle Mile.". Half a century later, the Royal Mint celebrated Bannister's record by issuing a 50 pence coin showing an athlete's running legs against a stopwatch. Bannister gained global sporting glory on May 6, 1954, when he ran a mile (1.6 kilometres) three minutes 59.4 seconds at the Iffley Road track in Oxford. "He banked his treasure in the hearts of his friends," they added, in a statement published by the Press Association news agency. "Sir Roger Bannister, died peacefully in Oxford on 3rd March 2018, aged 88, surrounded by his family who were as loved by him, as he was loved by them," his family said. Record-breaking British athlete Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, has died aged 88, his family announced on Sunday.
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