The statistical value of a sub-four-minute mile

Run a mile in 3:59 and something peculiar happens.

You haven’t merely run a very good time. You have broken the four-minute barrier. You have joined the sub-four club. It becomes a credential that can follow you around for the rest of your career.

Run 20.58 for 200m and… well, you’ve run 20.58. Throw 63.77m in the discus and nobody inducts you into an exclusive fraternity. There are no misty-eyed articles each spring about the latest athletes to join the 63.77 club.

And yet, according to the current World Athletics scoring tables, those performances are of essentially the same statistical standard as a four-minute mile.

This is the bit about the mile that has always puzzled me.

I’ve written separately about why I think the distance has acquired such an extraordinary cultural status. But strip away Bannister, nostalgia, four laps and all the mythology for a moment and there is a simpler question: How good is a four-minute mile, actually?

Putting four minutes into perspective

World Athletics’ scoring tables are designed to provide a way of comparing performances across different disciplines. They’re not holy scripture. Comparing a 1500m runner with a discus thrower is never going to be an exact science, and the tables themselves are periodically updated as the statistical landscape of athletics changes.

But they are probably the best objective tool we have for answering this particular question.

The current tables were updated in 2025 using recent performance data. A 4:00.00 mile is worth 1130 points.

Here are some performances worth roughly the same:

Every one of those is an excellent performance. But that’s rather the point.

Nobody hears 45.73 for 400m and reacts as though some mythical frontier of human performance has been breached. A 3:38 1500m runner is not invited to join the “3:38 club”. An 82-metre javelin thrower has not broken the 82-metre barrier in any meaningful cultural sense.

Yet put essentially the same level of athletic ability into a mile and suddenly we’ve got capital-B Barrier territory.

Good? Absolutely. Magical? That’s different

None of this is intended to dismiss a sub-four-minute mile. If you can run one, congratulations: you are extremely good at running. I cannot. Most people cannot. The vast majority of competitive runners cannot.

But “extremely good” and “uniquely significant” are different things.

That’s where I think the perception of four minutes has become skewed. The history surrounding the mark is so powerful that people can end up treating the performance itself as though it belongs several rungs higher on the athletics ladder than it actually does.

It doesn’t.

Statistically, it sits alongside plenty of performances that happen around the world every season without anyone reaching for the bunting.

The difference is not really sporting value. It is cultural value.

But fewer people have done it than climbed Everest!

Another statistic sometimes wheeled out in defence of the four-minute mile is that fewer people have broken four minutes than have climbed Mount Everest. It sounds impressive. Until you think about it.

For starters, considerably more people have climbed Everest than many people probably realise. By the end of 2025, there had been 13,737 successful ascents of the mountain, achieved by 7,563 different people.

The dedicated sub-4 mile register, meanwhile, listed 2,349 members as of February 2026.

So yes: it is true. More than three times as many people have climbed Everest as have officially broken four minutes for the mile. But what exactly does that prove?

Climbing Everest and running a four-minute mile are completely different types of achievement. Everest is an expedition challenge requiring fitness, acclimatisation, considerable resources, favourable conditions and no small amount of courage. It has been completed by men and women across a broad range of ages and physiological profiles.

A sub-four mile is an elite physiological performance standard which, to date, has only ever been achieved by men. Comparing the number of people who have done each is apples and crampons.

There is also a fairly enormous selection effect. Thousands upon thousands of elite runners have never seriously raced a mile. The 1500m is the standard championship distance, so an athlete perfectly capable of breaking four minutes might go through an entire career without ever having the opportunity – or inclination – to do so.

But there’s an even bigger problem with the Everest comparison: if rarity is the point, why does nobody apply the same test to other athletics events?

Roughly 1,100 women have broken 52 seconds for 400m. Only a little over 600 men had thrown 20 metres in the shot by mid-2025. So if Everest climbers are our chosen barometer, the women’s sub-52-second 400m club is about seven times more exclusive than the Everest club. The men’s 20-metre shot club is about 12 times more exclusive.

Oddly, you don’t hear much about either. Nobody solemnly informs us that fewer men have thrown 20 metres than have scaled the world’s highest mountain. The same applies to many other marks across various disciplines. And that is really the problem with the Everest statistic.

It doesn’t demonstrate that a sub-four mile occupies some exceptional place in the hierarchy of athletic performance. It simply takes an impressive-sounding comparison, applies it to one event and stops before asking what would happen if we applied exactly the same logic everywhere else.

Do that, and the magic rather quickly disappears.

Athletics is full of arbitrary barriers

Part of the attraction of four minutes is obvious. Four laps. Four minutes. Nice and neat.

But athletics is absolutely riddled with nice, neat numbers: Ten seconds for 100m. Twenty seconds for 200m. Two minutes for the women’s 800m. Thirteen minutes for 5000m. Eight metres in the long jump. Six metres in the pole vault. Twenty metres in the shot.

All completely arbitrary thresholds, of course. But if we’re going to celebrate the anniversary of Bannister’s barrier-breaking run each year, it seems only fair that the other events get their turn.

So here is a considerably more manageable version of the calendar I compiled when I first wrote this piece in 2014.

The calendar of arbitrary athletics barriers

25 May – Jesse Owens becomes the first man to jump beyond eight metres, leaping 8.13m in 1935. It was part of his extraordinary afternoon in Ann Arbor in which he set or equalled multiple world records. His long jump record lasted 25 years.

22 June – Irena Szewińska becomes the first woman to break 50 seconds for 400m, running 49.9 in Warsaw in 1974.

11 July – Hildegard Falck becomes the first woman officially recognised as breaking two minutes for 800m, clocking 1:58.5 in Stuttgart in 1971. Two laps, two minutes. Come on, that’s practically begging for a mythology of its own.

13 July – Sergey Bubka becomes the first man to clear six metres in the pole vault, achieving the feat in Paris in 1985.

16 July – Steve Cram becomes the first man to break 3:30 for 1500m, beating Saïd Aouita 3:29.67 to 3:29.71 in Nice in 1985. And unlike Bannister’s record attempt, this one came from an absolute belter of a race.

22 July – Aouita becomes the first man to break 13 minutes for 5000m, running 12:58.39 in Rome in 1987.

12 August – Bill Nieder becomes the first man to throw the shot beyond 20 metres, reaching 20.06m in 1960.

19 August – Renaldo Nehemiah becomes the first man to break 13 seconds for 110m hurdles, running 12.93 in Zurich in 1981. Twenty minutes later, Sebastian Coe broke the mile world record. Guess which kind of barrier gets talked about rather more often.

14 October – Jim Hines runs 9.95 to win the Olympic 100m title in Mexico City in 1968, the first officially recognised electronically timed sub-10 performance. Hines had already recorded a hand-timed 9.9 earlier that year.

16 October – Tommie Smith becomes the first man officially under 20 seconds for 200m, winning the Olympic title in 19.83.

There. Your calendar is sorted. Cards and flowers presumably optional.

The numbers aren’t the reason

Some of those breakthroughs were more statistically significant than others. Some were world records that lasted for years; others were round-number milestones destined to be passed fairly routinely.

Which is precisely why I’m not suggesting we genuinely start commemorating all of them every year. The point is that athletics contains hundreds of these thresholds.

Four minutes for the mile is not special because four minutes represents some uniquely high standard of athletic performance. Nor is it special simply because it is a round number. Plenty of events have those.

The difference lies not in the performance, but in the story athletics chose to tell about it.

Becoming the first person through any famous barrier carries significance, and Roger Bannister’s 3:59.4 was an outstanding performance for its era.

But a modern athlete running 3:59 does not suddenly become a different species of athlete from somebody running 3:38 for 1500m, 20.58 for 200m or throwing 20 metres in the shot.

The scoring tables provide a useful reality check. A sub-four-minute mile is very good; it is not supernatural.

The magic comes from somewhere else. And if you want to know where I think that came from, well, I’ve written about that too.

Views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of any employer.