Athletics · 1954 · Oxford, England
The First Four-Minute Mile
A 25-year-old British medical student becomes the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, a barrier long believed to be beyond human physiology.
3:59.4
Time
6 May 1954
Date
Iffley Road track, Oxford
Venue
For years, sports scientists and athletes alike had treated the four-minute mile as close to a physical limit, a wall that repeated close attempts by top milers around the world had failed to break. Roger Bannister, training around his medical studies at Oxford, approached it as a solvable problem, refining his pacing strategy with training partners Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher.
On a windy evening at the Iffley Road track on 6 May 1954, with Brasher and Chataway alternating as pacemakers, Bannister ran 3 minutes 59.4 seconds in front of a small crowd of around 3,000 spectators. The announcer, Norris McWhirter, drew out the announcement of the time deliberately, and the roar that followed the word 'three' before the rest of the sentence drowned out the decimal.
The record lasted only 46 days before Australia's John Landy broke it, underlining that the real barrier had been psychological rather than physical, once one man had done it, others quickly followed. Bannister always considered the achievement a shared one with his pacemakers, and went on to a career in neurology, but the sub-four-minute mile remained forever attached to his name.
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