In 1954, athlete Christopher Chataway won the inaugural BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, or Sports Review of the Year, as it was known at the time. Fellow athlete Roger Bannister finished second in the public postal vote, ahead of pioneering equestrian Patricia Smythe, who had became a household name in the years following World War II.
On October 13, 1954, Chataway recorded a a dramatic victory, but just 0.1 seconds, over Soviet athlete Vladimir Kuts in a televised 5,000m race at White City Stadium, London, which was broadcast to 12 million viewers. In so doing, he ran 13:51.6, thereby taking exactly five seconds off Kuts’ world record, which he had set in Bern, Switzerland just over six weeks previously.
By that stage, he had already won a gold medal in the men’s 3 miles event at the Empire Stadium in Vancouver, Canada during the British Empire and Commonwealth Games. At the same Games, Bannister defeated by-then world record holder John Landy, of Australia, in the final of the men’s 1 mile event, dubbed the ‘Miracle Mile’, with both men running under four minutes.
In a memorable year for British athletics, perhaps most famously of all, Chataway also played his part when Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile at the Iffley Road track in Oxford on May 6, 1954. Alongside Christopher Brasher, he acted as a pacemaker for Bannister, leading him into the final 250 yards on so, on his way to a historic time of 3:59.4. That world record lasted only until June 21, 1954, when the aforementioned John Landy ran 3:58.0 at the Paavo Nurmi Stadium in Turku, Finland.
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Chataway went on to compete at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, but could finish only eleventh, behind Kuts, in the final of the 5,000m, having suffered stomach cramps. He retired from international competition shortly afterwards. Chataway subsequently became a newsreader, a Conservative Member of Parliament and, in 1995, received a knighthood for his services to the aviation industry, which he served as chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). He died of cancer in January 2014, aged 82.