Back in May 2010, on the eve of the anniversary of Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile, I wrote what I thought was a mildly irreverent blog post.
I didn’t understand the fuss.
Why, I wondered, did athletics treat a 3:59 mile as though it bestowed some kind of sporting immortality, while equivalent – and sometimes superior – performances in other events passed almost unnoticed? Why Roger Bannister and not Jim Hines, the first man to break 10 seconds for 100m? Why did four laps in four minutes possess this apparently unique “magic”?
Sixteen years later, I still largely stand by what I wrote. What’s changed is that I think I can explain the discomfort better now. Back then, I was mainly asking why the mile attracted so much disproportionate reverence. These days, I’m more interested in where that reverence came from, who built the mythology around it, and whose version of athletics history it reflects.
My issue was never really with Roger Bannister. Nor, despite appearances, do I have some pathological objection to running 1609.344 metres.
My issue is with the cult of the mile: the reverence, the mystique, the endless sepia-tinted harking back to Bannister, Landy, Ryun, Ovett and the supposed golden age of miling.
And the older I’ve got, the more I’ve come to think that its “magic” isn’t universal at all. To a significant extent, the mile is nostalgia for white men.
There. I’ve said it.
First things first: a four-minute mile is very good
One thing I wanted to establish in my original post was what a sub-four-minute mile is actually worth.
This is important because mile mythology has given some people a wildly skewed impression of the standard involved. Say that someone has run 3:59 and it can sound as though they’ve scaled athletics’ north face without oxygen. They haven’t.
They have run very bloody well. But there is a difference.
The current World Athletics scoring tables give a 4:00.00 mile 1130 points. Performances worth the same score include 3:38.29 for 1500m, 20.58 for 200m, 7.97m in the long jump, 20.15m in the shot put, 63.77m in the discus and 82.00m in the javelin. In the 100m, the equivalent sits roughly between 10.22 and 10.23.
Every one of those is an excellent performance. But I’ve never heard somebody introduced reverentially as “a 20.58 man”.
There isn’t a special club for people who have thrown the discus 63.77m. Nobody publishes breathless articles each spring about the latest crop of athletes to have finally joined the ranks of the 7.97m long jumpers. Run 3:59.99, though, and you’ve crossed the barrier.
While it remains a significant achievement – and vastly beyond anything 99.999% of us could contemplate – its modern sporting value doesn’t explain its cultural status.
Something else does.
Why Bannister and not Hines?
This was the comparison I kept coming back to in 2010, and I still think it’s a good one.
Jim Hines became the first man officially to break 10 seconds for 100m in 1968. He then won the Olympic title in Mexico City in an electronically timed world record of 9.95. His world record survived for 15 years.
Think about how perfectly marketable that barrier is: One hundred metres. Ten seconds. The first man in history under 10. The fastest man in the world.
And yet where is the Hines mythology remotely comparable to Bannister’s? Where are the annual commemorations on 14 October? Where are the books about the seemingly impossible ten-second barrier?
There are obvious differences. One happened in Britain, one in Mexico City. One involved four minutes of mounting tension, the other less than 10 seconds. Being the first person through a psychological barrier naturally gives a performance extra significance.
But those differences don’t fully explain the gulf. And that was what 25-year-old me was struggling to articulate.
The interesting question isn’t whether four minutes is difficult enough to deserve celebration. It’s why Western sporting culture chose this particular round-number barrier, achieved by this particular athlete, in this particular event, and turned it into folklore.
Bannister’s achievement was real. So was the manufacturing.
Let me be clear here, because this is where people sometimes think criticism of the mythology means criticism of the athlete.
Roger Bannister’s 3:59.4 was an outstanding achievement. It was also a carefully constructed record attempt.
His friends Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway acted as pacemakers, taking him through the early stages before Bannister completed the job. Bannister himself later described how they had trained together and planned the pacing because running evenly was fundamental to breaking four minutes.
There is absolutely nothing illegitimate about that. Paced record attempts are part of athletics. Josh Kerr’s sensational 3:42.66 world record in London this year was similarly targeted, publicly branded “Project 222”, and assisted by pacemakers.
But the popular telling of Bannister’s story can make it sound as though an English medical student wandered down to Iffley Road one windy afternoon, stared down a physiological impossibility and single-handedly altered the limits of the human species.
Even Bannister seemed slightly bemused by what people subsequently made of it. “I think the four-minute mile has been overrated,” he said immediately afterwards. “After all, it’s only a time.”
John Landy – who broke Bannister’s world record just 46 days later – was similarly unimpressed by the supposed barrier, later calling the four-minute mile “vastly over-rated”.
Landy’s explanation for its appeal was far more prosaic: everybody understood a mile, everybody understood four minutes and there was a pleasing symmetry to four laps of roughly 60 seconds each. Which is fair enough. But pleasing symmetry does not, by itself, sustain 72 years of mythology.
Who gets to create sporting folklore?
This was the more uncomfortable part of my 2010 post. I wrote then that the people most determined to preserve the mystique of the four-minute mile seemed to be predominantly white, Western men – people who could identify with Bannister and with the period he represented.
I then asked whether the achievement would be regarded quite so reverentially had Hungary’s László Tábori got there first. Or, more pointedly, an African runner.
I can’t prove that counterfactual. Nobody can. But 16 years later, I think the underlying question is more interesting than I expressed it back then.
Who had the power to turn sporting achievements into mythology? Bannister was an Englishman running at Oxford, in an event with deep roots in British and Anglosphere sporting culture. His achievement landed in an enormous media ecosystem ready to embrace it. He appeared on the front pages of every major British newspaper and, according to the Bannister Miles historical archive, in about 1600 US newspapers.
It was the perfect story for the people telling the stories. That does not diminish what Bannister did. It explains how a sporting achievement becomes something larger. And it is impossible to separate the mile’s heritage from the countries that traditionally invested most meaning in it: Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand in particular.
The mile isn’t – and never was – the standard global championship middle-distance event. The men’s 1500m has been in the Olympic programme since 1896. So when people talk misty-eyed about restoring the mile to its rightful place, it is worth asking: whose rightful place?
This isn’t athletics recovering some universal lost tradition. It is largely the Anglosphere revisiting its own sporting childhood.
And then there are the women
This is the part of the argument I barely understood in 2010.
Remarkably, Roger Bannister wasn’t even the only British athlete to break a famous mile barrier in May 1954. 23 days after Bannister ran 3:59.4 in Oxford, Diane Leather ran 4:59.6 in Birmingham to become the first woman in history to break five minutes for the mile. Same country. Same month. Same event. Another lovely round-number barrier. And almost none of the mythology.
Women’s mile performances were not even eligible for official world-record ratification until 1967. That is quite difficult to square with the idea that there is something intrinsically magical about round numbers and four laps of a track. Apparently the magic depended rather heavily on who was running them.
In my original article I also cited Sin Kim Dan’s sub-two-minute 800m – two laps, two minutes, another beautifully neat barrier.
Athletics is full of barriers. We decide which ones matter. And historically, we were considerably more enthusiastic about immortalising men’s.
“This isn’t marketability, it’s male nostalgia”
Canadian runner Sheila Reid put it much more succinctly in 2015. When the idea was floated of replacing the NCAA 1500m with the mile, Reid questioned the supposed marketability argument.
“While the mile might be significant for men (sub-4) there is no such significance for women,” she wrote. “This isn’t marketability; it’s male nostalgia.”
She was promptly piled on. One prominent US running forum started a thread headed “Sheila Reid is losing It – Hilarity Ensues”. Its co-founder called her argument “absurd”. Among the responses was the wonderfully revealing: “Yeah, I’m white, I like the mile distance, keep it.”
Sometimes your rebuttal arrives gift-wrapped.
Reid’s underlying point was not that women cannot run or enjoy the mile. Obviously they can. It was that the principal cultural hook being used to sell the event – the four-minute barrier and all the history attached to it – belonged overwhelmingly to men’s sport.
There is no female equivalent. Faith Kipyegon is arguably the greatest female middle-distance runner in history. Her official mile world record is 4:07.64. In 2025, Nike constructed an entire Breaking4 project around trying to make her the first woman under four minutes, using specialist pacemakers and an exhibition format that was not record eligible. She ran 4:06.42.
So four minutes for men is now a rite of passage achieved by thousands. For women, it remains beyond the fastest woman ever. You cannot build equivalent traditions around those two things simply because the distance is the same.
Glasgow 2026 rather proved the point
And then, as if athletics wanted to provide a case study for this article, the Commonwealth Games brought the mile back this year.
The men’s mile had not been contested at the Games since 1966. Sixty years later, Glasgow restored it, with new world record-holder Josh Kerr racing in his home city. It was nostalgia catnip. Kerr won. The stadium loved it. It made complete sense as event promotion.
But tucked inside all that glorious Commonwealth mile heritage was a rather wonderful detail: the women’s mile was being contested at the Commonwealth Games for the first time ever. One side of the event was being revived after a 60-year absence because of its rich history, while the other side had no history to revive.
I struggle to think of a cleaner illustration of Reid’s “male nostalgia” argument.
And what about race?
I’ve long had a suspicion that high-profile mile fields are sometimes curated in a way that gives disproportionately generous representation to British, American, European and Oceanian athletes compared with the actual global depth of men’s middle-distance running.
Commercially, I can understand why. If you’re staging the Bowerman Mile in Eugene, Americans sell tickets. If you’re staging an Emsley Carr Mile in London, British athletes matter to the crowd. Local representation happens in every discipline.
But I do wonder whether the effect is amplified in the mile precisely because Western identification and heritage form part of the event’s appeal.
This year’s London mile is a clear example. The 10 finishers comprised five Britons, four Americans and one German. There was not a single African athlete among them.
At the Bowerman Mile in Eugene, seven of the 12 finishers were American, alongside two Kenyans, an Australian, a German and a Frenchman. Again: it’s an American meeting. That isn’t exactly a smoking gun.
One day when I have a bit more time, I’d be tempted to look at 15 or 20 years of major international mile races, then compare the nationalities and world rankings of the athletes invited with equivalent 1500m races, to see whether Western athletes are indeed over-represented.
Maybe the data would demolish my theory. Fine. That’s what data is for. But the suspicion persists because the mile is unusual in athletics: the cultural identity of the event is itself part of what promoters are selling.
This doesn’t mean the mile belongs only to white athletes
There is an obvious rebuttal to all this. African athletes have contributed enormously to mile history. The men’s world record has been held by athletes from Tanzania, Algeria and Morocco. Hicham El Guerrouj’s 3:43.13 survived for 27 years before Kerr finally broke it this summer. Of course.
I’m not arguing that the event is white, and nor am I saying everyone who enjoys a mile race is secretly yearning for 1954 Britain. (That said, I do sometimes view the mile as the National Trust property of athletics: attractive, historic, lovingly preserved and presented as though its heritage belongs equally to everyone.)
I’m arguing that much of the nostalgia surrounding it comes from a particular cultural tradition. Those are completely different things.
I enjoy a good mile race. Kerr’s world record in London this year was fantastic. Kipyegon’s 4:07.64 was incredible. The Bowerman Mile and Dream Mile routinely produce brilliant races. Four laps is an excellent distance.
My issue is with the idea that it possesses some innate magic that other athletics events somehow lack.
Maybe I was asking the wrong question
In 2010, I ended my original article by suggesting that perhaps we should finally “put the magic of the sub-four-minute mile to bed”.
I don’t think that any more. The magic plainly exists. You only have to listen to the reaction whenever someone breaks four minutes for the first time, or watch the excitement generated by the revival of a famous mile race.
I’m much more interested now in understanding where that magic came from. Sporting traditions don’t become sacred by accident. Someone decides which stories get told. Someone decides which barriers matter. Someone decides which achievements are commemorated for generations and which disappear into a results book.
Roger Bannister deserves his place in athletics history. His achievement was significant and his story is a wonderful one. But Jim Hines has a wonderful story too. So did Diane Leather. So do hundreds of athletes in events whose arbitrary numerical thresholds never acquired their own mythology.
Perhaps, then, the interesting question was never whether the four-minute mile is magical. It is. The questions are why, to whom, and whose nostalgia we are actually celebrating.
The mile has a wonderful history. We should just stop pretending that it’s everyone’s history.