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 Santee's
vow starts saga of 'Perfect Mile'
 The
Christian Science Monitor calls the new book a "resplendent
story of an epic event in sports history."
And the story of The Perfect Mile begins at KU.
It culminates on May 6, 1954, when Briton Roger Bannister
ran a mile in 3:59.4 and won international acclaim for
breaking the four-minute mile barrier.
Fifty years later, the new book by Neal Bascomb, The
Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal and Less than
Four Minutes to Achieve It, relives the events leading
up to Bannister's triumph and how it all started with
KU's farmboy-turned-track star Wes Santee.
It was Santee who announced his intention to be the
first to shatter the four-minute barrier, prompting
a race between Santee, Bannister and Australian John
Landy to see who would be first.
Santee, d'54, set multiple world records and won many
conference and NCAA titles. He took first place in the
Kansas Relays mile back-to-back in 1954 and 1955, his
first effort turning in the second-fastest American
time in history. In 1952, he was named Most Outstanding
Performer for anchoring the four-mile relay and for
his running of the three-lap leg of the Distance Medley
Relay. A 1952 Olympian, Santee ran just a fraction of
a second over the four-minute mark in the mile before
Bannister broke the four-minute mark in 1954.
Bascomb, author of the new book, appeared at KU last
month along with Santee for a book signing at the Kansas
Union. He also attended the induction of the inaugural
class for the Kansas Relays Hall of Fame, which included
Santee; Glenn Cunningham, d'34; Bill Easton, e'42; Bob
Timmons, d'50, g'50; Al Oerter, '58; Billy Mills, d'62;
and Jim Ryun, j'70.
But that's not the end of the story. The team behind
the movie "Seabiscuit" is developing a major
motion picture based on The Perfect Mile.
Biographies of Kansas Relays hall of fame inductees:
http://www.kuathletics.com/track/releases/2_19_04.html
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