The Four Minute Mile: Oxford, 1954
1954 · event
On the evening of 6 May 1954 a strong wind was blowing across the cinder track at Iffley Road in Oxford. Roger Bannister, a twenty five year old medical student, almost called the attempt off. The wind dropped shortly before the start, and with two friends setting the pace, Chris Brasher for the first half and Chris Chataway for the third lap, he ran the last stretch alone and collapsed at the line. The announcer began to read the time, and the crowd drowned him out at the words three minutes. The mile had been run in three minutes fifty nine and four tenths of a second.
The four minute mile had become a fixed idea in athletics, discussed as a physiological wall rather than a number. Bannister trained in the gaps of a hospital timetable, often for less than an hour a day, and approached the problem as a scientist as much as an athlete, studying his own oxygen use in the laboratory where he worked.
The barrier lasted forty six days. The Australian John Landy ran a faster mile in Finland in June, and in August the two met in Vancouver in a race that was called the Miracle Mile, with both men finishing under four minutes and Bannister winning after Landy glanced over his shoulder on the final bend.
Bannister retired from competition that year and spent his life as a neurologist, describing his medical work as the achievement that mattered more to him. The run is remembered because it changed what runners believed was available to them. Within a few years the four minute mile was ordinary among the best, and it remains the clearest sporting example of a limit that existed mainly in the mind.