Australia is mourning one of its greatest sportsmen John Landy, who has died at the age of 91 after a life full of achievement both on and off the athletics track.
The middle distance legend, the second man to break the four-minute mile barrier, passed away at his home in Castlemaine, Victoria, on Thursday surrounded by his family after a long battle with Parkinson's .
Landy, a figure of huge integrity and class, was responsible for the finest and most selfless Australian sporting moment of the 20th century - even if it didn't sit easily with him.
By his own admission, he would have preferred to be remembered as simply a good runner.
Or for becoming the 26th Governor of Victoria, an office he discharged with the same dignity and good sense that characterised his life.
Or for his work on the Australian Sports Commission. Or his writings on nature.
Or perhaps even for creating one of his country's finest butterfly collections.
For John Michael Landy may have been one of the greatest middle-distance runners of his era, but he was much more - a capable scientist, an author, a humanitarian, a husband and a father.
But it was for his athletic prowess, a talent developed as a boy chasing butterflies through paddocks around Melbourne, that Landy first came to prominence.
He initially took up competitive running to help him get fit for football, only becoming serious about it after making the Victorian athletics team in 1951.
Within 12 months he was on the Australian team for the Helsinki Olympics, and a couple of years later became deeply engaged in a battle with Englishman Roger Bannister to become the first man to achieve a feat thought to be beyond human capability - to run a mile in under four minutes.
As Landy and Bannister rolled on toward the magical mark, their ambition became one of the most eagerly anticipated events in the history of sport.
Ultimately, Bannister won that "race", stopping the clock in a state of near-collapse at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds at Oxford on May 6, 1954.
Less than two months later in Finland, Landy, who had threatened the mark several times that year, breezed past Bannister's
