Four-minute mile
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- This article is about the running of a mile in under four minutes. For the album by The Get Up Kids, see Four Minute Mile.
The four minute mile, in athletics, is the running of a mile (1,609.344 metres) in under four minutes. It was once thought by some to be impossible but has now been achieved by many male athletes, and is now the standard of all professional middle distance runners. In the last 50 years the 4 minute barrier has been lowered by almost 17 seconds.
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[edit] Roger Bannister
On May 6, 1954, the Englishman Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile in recorded history at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. Six weeks later, John Landy, an Australian, followed suit with 3:58, breaking Bannister's record. In November, 2005, Forbes magazine declared after interviewing a number of sports experts that Bannister's four minute mile was "the greatest athletic achievement" of all time.
During the fiftieth anniversary of Roger Bannister's run, the British athlete Ken Wood claimed that he broke four minutes four weeks before Bannister, in a training event [1] . However, this is controversial, and a former editor of Athletics Weekly, Mel Watman, has written a letter of complaint to the magazine for running the story [2].
In 2005, a film was made about Roger Bannister's triumph entitled Four Minutes and aired on ESPN.
[edit] Record holders
The New Zealander John Walker managed to run at least a hundred sub-four-minute miles during his career, and American Steve Scott has run the most sub-four-minute miles, with 136. Currently, the mile record is held by Hicham El Guerrouj, who set a time of 3 minutes 43.13 seconds in Rome in 1999.
Another illustration of the progression of performance in the men's mile is that in 1994, forty years after Bannister's breaking of the barrier, the Irish runner Eamonn Coghlan became the first man over age 40 to run a sub-four-minute mile.
[edit] Women record holders
No woman has ever run a four-minute mile. The current women's record holder is Russian Svetlana Masterkova, with a time of 4 minutes 12.56 seconds.
