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Roger Bannister & Clive van Ryneveld (Atherton article in The Times)

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International Coach
Great piece in The Times by Athers.

Roger Bannister and Clive van Ryneveld are symbols of what sport has lost

In those heady but difficult postwar years, cycling between lectures and the sports fields, I wonder whether Roger Bannister and Clive van Ryneveld ever met? Both were contemporaries at Oxford in the late 1940s, Bannister studying medicine at Exeter College and Van Ryneveld studying law at University College; studying, that is, in between their various sporting enthusiasms.

They wouldn’t necessarily have had much in common, Bannister the boy from suburban north London, interested in matters of the mind, the body and running; Van Ryneveld, a Rhodes scholar from the right side of the tracks in Cape Town — Bishops school, no less — and talented at rugby and cricket. Nevertheless, both were so open-minded, curious and empathetic, it is hard to imagine that they would not have found common ground.

Both stand as mighty testament to a time when it was possible to excel at the highest level of sport and remain engaged in a broader intellectual life, and they stand as a vivid demonstration of how much sport has lost in that gradual drift towards narrow-focused professionalism. How many future sportsmen will be able to boast of the achievements, on and off the field, of men such as these, or reflect on a life lived in the round?

The only similarities were the span of their lives and their extraordinarily varied careers, both of which have been chronicled within the past month in the obituary section of this newspaper, Bannister having died on Sunday and Van Ryneveld in January. The titles of their autobiographies, Twin Tracks in Bannister’s case, 20th Century All-Rounder under Van Ryneveld’s name, imply that sport was simply one small part of a life well lived. Many sportsmen, with half their achievements, now boast of more than one autobiography — these men could have filled volumes.

If there was an element of luck in their lives — and only the supremely self-regarding would not admit to some fortune along the way — it was when they were born, 1928 in Van Ryneveld’s case, a year later in Bannister’s. That lucky interlude meant that they missed both the great wars of the early 20th century, their sporting and intellectual fruition coming at Oxford shortly after the end of the Second World War, when to grasp at all that life has to offer must have seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.

Bannister’s crowning achievement on the track was still some years away, and at Oxford, Van Ryneveld must have been viewed as something of a sporting god. He won blues at rugby and cricket, running the length of the field at Twickenham to score a try to beat Cambridge in the 1948 Varsity match, and taking seven for 57 in the corresponding cricket fixture at Lord’s that year (Cambridge had four future England players, John Dewes, Hubert Doggart, Trevor Bailey and Doug Insole, three of whom were dismissed by him) and then captaining the university in their defeat of New Zealand the next year.

In South Africa, Van Ryneveld had also been a junior tennis champion in Western Province and a record-setting hurdler (echoes of AB de Villiers here), but cricket and rugby were his main sports. He was unusual in that he became a double international for two countries, winning rugby caps as a fleet-footed centre for England in the Five Nations tournament of 1949 and then making his debut as a batsman-***-leg-spinner, and brilliant fielder, against England for South Africa at Trent Bridge two years later. After turning down a tour or two in order to set up his legal practice, he eventually captained his country against England in 1956-57 and Australia a year later, playing 19 Tests in all.

By this stage, of course, Bannister had etched his name into the record books for eternity. After doing the rounds at St Mary’s hospital on the morning of May 6, 1954, he took the train to Oxford, had lunch with friends and made his way to the evening meet at Iffley Road, and to his destiny. Four months later, a month after beating his great rival John Landy in Vancouver in what was called the “miracle mile”, when both men ran under four minutes, Bannister retired aged 25 to take up a career in medicine.

Landy is immortalised in a statue at Olympic Park, Melbourne, the site of his famous act of sportsmanship during the 1956 National Championships, when he stopped to check on a fallen runner, Ron Clarke, before rejoining and winning the race. The end of Van Ryneveld’s international career was just a year away from this episode, and his last series as a Test cricketer involved two similar acts of charity: first when he declined to appeal for a run-out at Durban after a disputed boundary call, and second when he removed his quicker bowlers from the fray in Port Elizabeth because they were bowling too many bouncers. The ethos of the time was to win, but not at all costs.

Far from over, with sport done, the lives of these two remarkable men were just beginning. Van Ryneveld was elected to parliament in 1957, was one of a dozen MPs to resign from the United Party and set up the Progressive Party two years later, to campaign against the racist policies of the government. He lost his seat in 1961, after which he returned to the Cape and the law.

After the Paarl riots of 1962, he defended five men, pro bono, from the charge of sabotage, two of whom were acquitted, three of whom were sentenced to death. A letter from one of those so sentenced thanking him for his efforts remained in his possession, and he later wrote: “That such a person could be driven to violence and be hanged for it was an awful indictment of our system.” He continued to represent the oppressed in many ways, notably as chairman of the John Passmore Trust, which worked to encourage cricket in the townships of the Cape.

Bannister became a renowned physician and pioneering neurologist, winning a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Neurology, as well as finding time to be a noted sporting administrator and, later, the master of Pembroke College, Oxford. “Running,” he said, “was just a small part of my life. I thought the ideal was the complete man who had a career outside sport.”

There are only 17 seconds or so between Bannister’s then world record and the one that has stood for 19 years set by Hicham el Guerrouj, but in that short span of time, sport has lost something profound. The fact that Guerrouj’s record has stood for so long in the modern era shows that we are close to the limits of human potential, beyond which only an unhealthily obsessive focus and/or malpractice will see it lowered, both approaches of which would have been anathema to Bannister.

Having met Van Ryneveld once, it does not take much intuition to work out what he would have thought of the shenanigans in South Africa where, during the latest Test series, David Warner and Quinton de Kock have been charged with offences by the match referee amid some unseemly and pathetic “he said, you said” nonsense. Were those involved able to remove the blinkers and see how ridiculous they look, it might help. But the demands of modern, professional sport more often than not require a single-minded focus and teams populated with specialists rather than generalists.

As the recent interview in these pages with Laura Muir, top-class runner and vet-to-be, suggests — and the MBA achieved by Manchester City’s Vincent Kompany shows — it is not impossible to reconcile a career in modern professional sport with an appetite for a varied and interesting life, although it is not easy. The examples of the remarkable and wholly fulfilling lives of Bannister and Van Ryneveld suggest they might have enjoyed the best of times.
 

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