The four-minute mile: “a sporting Rubicon”

“Even now, 64 years on, 3:59.4 is a number recognisable to every sports fan,” said Sean Ingle in The Guardian. By becoming the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, Roger Bannister – who died last Saturday ( see page 47) – achieved a “record for the ages”. Yet Bannister wasn’t the first person to be credited with a sub-four-minute mile, said Duncan Mackay in the same paper. In 1770, almost two centuries before Bannister’s “epoch-making performance”, the feat was attributed to James Parrott, a London costermonger who had accepted a 15-guinea wager that he couldn’t run a mile in under four-and-a-half minutes.

The story of Parrott’s run was soon dismissed as a fable, because for a long time no one believed a four-minute mile was physically possible, said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. It came to be seen as a “sporting Rubicon”. Walter George set a time of 4:12.75 in 1886, which stood for a remarkable three decades; Jules Ladoumègue, in 1931, “left track and field’s most tantalising target” a mere nine seconds away. The record kept getting trimmed by “tiny increments” – and by the time of Bannister’s attempt, in 1954, it stood at 4:01.4. Even then, many considered a four-minute mile “beyond the limits of what the human heart and lungs could tolerate”. But Bannister’s record was left in the dust a long time ago: the current record, set by Moroccan runner Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999, is 3:43.13.