Or so it seems at first sight. But, beneath the surface, the picture's more complicated. Even in Bannister's charming description of his self-consciously amateurish success, we get glimpses of a more hard-headed professionalism. So-called "effortless superiority" is rarely as "effortless" as it pretends to be. It wasn't all do-it-yourself preparation on the lab grindstone. He himself explains that he had some super-light running shoes specially made (4oz rather than 6oz per shoe - enough, he reckoned, to make all the difference between coming in under four minutes and not). He was also scientifically interested in how running times could be improved. One of his first academic papers, published in July 1954, was about the effects on athletic performance of taking supplementary oxygen (using himself and Norris McWhirter - one of the founders of the Guinness Book of Records - among the experimental subjects). There is absolutely no suggestion that the four-minute race was oxygen-assisted, but Bannister had more of a stake in the hi-tech science of running than we might imagine.