The British runner who set a milestone for women

When Diane Leather became the first woman to run a mile in under 5 minutes, her feat was ignored by track and field authorities.The International Amateur Athletics Federation had stopped tracking women’s distances greater than 800 meters following the 1928 Olympics, when six women had collapsed at the finish line. Anything above 200 meters, experts declared, was simply too strenuous for the female body. But female athletes continued to compete in longer distances, and at a 1954 meet in the English city of Birmingham, the 21-year-old Leather finished a mile in a record-breaking 4:59.6. “Oh good,” she said upon hearing her time. “At last.”