Athletics · 1954 · Oxford, England
The First Four-Minute Mile
A 25-year-old British medical student runs a mile in under four minutes, through a barrier a good many people had decided was physiological.
3:59.4
Time
6 May 1954
Date
Iffley Road track, Oxford
Venue
Sports scientists and athletes alike had spent years treating the four-minute mile as close to a physical limit, and a run of near misses by the best milers in the world had done nothing to argue otherwise. Roger Bannister, fitting training around his medical studies at Oxford, treated it as a problem to be solved, working out the pacing with his training partners Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher.
On a windy evening at the Iffley Road track on 6 May 1954, with Brasher and Chataway taking turns to pace him, Bannister ran 3 minutes 59.4 seconds in front of a crowd of around 3,000. The announcer, Norris McWhirter, drew the time out deliberately, and the roar that met the word 'three' buried everything that came after it.
The record lasted 46 days before Australia's John Landy took it, which told everyone what the barrier had actually been made of. Bannister always called it a shared achievement with his two pacemakers and went on to a career in neurology, and the mile stayed attached to his name regardless.
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