The race between England's Roger Bannister and Australia's John Landy marked the start of a new era, said Sports Illustrated in 1999. The head-to-head between the only two men to have broken the four-minute barrier for the mile was "the most widely heralded and universally contemplated footrace ever run".

The Americans had pinned their hopes on their own man, Wes Santee, to get there first but he never did achieve the feat, and was a commentator for NBC on the big day, August 7, 1954.

Bannister had broken the barrier on May 6 in Oxford, and in Finland 47 days later Landy bettered the record by 1.4sec. 

Landy refused invitations to go out and celebrate after that run. He said: "I went home early that night thinking 'that's history, now I've got to work out how I'm going to beat Bannister.'" He never did.

More than 500 American radio stations broadcast live commentary, as did the BBC and many others around the world. For the first time, a one-off sporting event with no Americans involved was shown live on US television. With radio listeners taken into account it was, at the time, the largest broadcast audience for any sporting event in history.

Landy was seen as the slight favourite because he had run so much faster than Bannister in Finland, and because the Englishman had been helped by pacemakers in breaking the four-minute barrier in Oxford.

With a lap to go, Landy looked the likelier winner according to the BBC commentator Rex Alston. Bannister had his worries at halfway - "Landy was a long way in front and looked like staying there", he recalled later – so he abandoned his carefully planned tactics on the third lap. He would have to run to Landy's time schedule, not his own. "That was the turning point," Alston said.

It worked. Alston was soon telling his listeners: "Bannister is coming up on him now, 150 yards to go and Bannister is gaining ever so slightly with each stride...130 yards to go and Bannister is coming up on Landy’s elbow."

Landy knew that Bannister would have to run a few yards more to overtake him on the outside and, expecting a challenge on his inside, he turned his head to look over his left shoulder. In his 1955 autobiography The First Four Minutes, Bannister wrote: "The moment he looked round he was unprotected against me and so lost a valuable fraction of a second in his response to my challenge. It was my tremendous luck that these two happenings, his turning round and my final spurt, came absolutely simultaneously."

Bannister went ahead. His finishing kick took him clear by five yards at the line. His 3min 58.8sec, more than half a second faster than his Oxford run, was 0.8sec ahead of Landy. For the first time in any race two men had run a mile inside four minutes.

Bannister collapsed, exhausted, before being carried through the crowds milling on the track. He recovered enough to jog after Landy, whom he hugged in congratulation.

Then he was called away to help his team-mate Jim Peters, who famously collapsed on the track in the closing stages of the marathon and failed to finish. Bannister was a doctor; he stayed behind to help Peters recover and accompanied him on the long journey back to Britain.

Bannister ran once more, winning the European Championship 1500 metres in Bern three weeks later. 

At the age of 25 he then retired from athletics, just as he had planned. Now he was ready for the important part of his life - raising a family and furthering his career in medicine.

"Running was only ever a small section of my life," he said. "If I'd had to give something up it would always have been running, never medicine."

He had qualified as a doctor eight weeks before the Commonwealth Games. His heroes as a teenager were not sportsmen but Nobel laureates - Madame Curie and Louis Pasteur.

Bannister was still involved in sport, as the first chairman of the Sports Council. 

He worked hard to encourage mass participation and to discourage the use of performance-enhancing drugs. He was knighted by the Queen in 1975 for services to sport. 

He became Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, and in 2005 received an honour that meant more to him than any from sport: a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Neurology. 

He died in 2018, aged 88.