it is a well known fact in the anthropology community that both Cro Magnon and Neanderthal men were exemplary runners surely capable of sub 3 minute miles but were wiped out by the emergent Homo Sapiens (modern man) whose cunning eradicated its more brawny and athletic competition.
Bannister has the official recognition.
But others have made claims with varying degree of proof.
Cunningham claimed to have done it in practice, but he never duplicated in competition, and his best official effort casts doubt on his being able to go sub 4.
Landy also claimed to have gone sub 4 before Bannister, and he backed it up with a 3:57 in actual competition, so his claim of going sub 4 before Bannister is more believable.
Big Hawk Chief has a claim for 3:57 from 1876. He did not push the claim himself, it is noted in passing in a US cavalry officers diary. It was not a publicity stunt and only came to light years after the fact, so deception is unlikely.
A few documented stories from even earlier show that a few athletes were within 10 seconds of going sub 4, so it is possible someone else went under 4 without a record of the event having survived.
Officially, Bannister is the man. But there will always be some doubt.
Thanks for putting that up. I had read similar things a while ago which was why I mentioned that there are references to sub four minute miles going back as far as the 18th century. But I couldn't recall the specifics,
tri and run wrote:
Landy also claimed to have gone sub 4 before Bannister
I don't think this is true.
J.L. the gallant victorian wrote:
tri and run wrote:Landy also claimed to have gone sub 4 before Bannister
I don't think this is true.
I don't think so either. Making a claim like that would have been incredibly out of character for Landy.
It's worth noting that, maybe a year before his sub-4:00, Bannister was in a mile race wherein one of his partners (Brasher, I think) ran the first two laps in three minutes, then ran his third lap with Bannister (who was running his fourth). Bannister's final time was 4:02ish, IIRC.
The BAAB (or whoever) disallowed the time as a national record because of the "unusual circumstances"--they didn't feel it was a legitimate competition. (Bannister later said that he was glad he hadn't gone under four then--it would have opened up a real can of worms.) Apparently they had no such problem with the circumstances of his first sub-4:00.
Good article
tri and run wrote:
Officially, Bannister is the man. But there will always be some doubt.
idiots will always doubt it maybe. bannister was without a doubt the first sub 4 miler
The 4 minute mile could have probably been broken in 1946 as opposed to 1954
Gunder Hagg and Arne Anderson (both Swedish) had a fierce rivalry and had a great series of mile races against each other (as opposed to Coe and Ovett) from 42 to 45, taking the world record down from 4.06.2 in 42 to 4.01.4 in 45.
They were both branded as professional in 46 and barred from athletic competition.
In fact, I don’t think the thought of breaking the 4 minute barrier entered their thoughts when they were racing - just beating each other and they went off at suicidal pace with no considerations about even pacing or of the finishing time. Had they have set off with pacemakers, as did Bannister, and ran rather restrained for the first half mile - who knows?
Infinite Minutes wrote:
This move to keep athletics pure and free from the contamination of money had a big effect on the history of the four-minute mile. Any runner who wanted to take the time to train and run seriously and needed money to do it, was systematically removed from the scene.
The greatest British miler of the late-Victorian age, Walter George, was forced out this way.
Forced out? He started off as an amateur and became a professional. His times are still known today (and, it is worth noting, are slower than the times reported in this article for runners a century earlier. Were the 19th century pros wimps and sissies compared to the manly men of the 18th century?).
I'm a little sceptical of the article's claim that times could easily be measured. Yes, Harrison's chronography was around then, but it was expensive. The first dedicated stopwatches didn't appear until the mid 19th century.
I find the article's extrapolation of marathon times to be laughable. It was probably possible for them to measure a 20 or 30 mile course accurately, but why would an 18th or 19th century organizer have bothered?
very interesting article. but a key point is that consistency does not equal accuracy. you could use watches that give consistent times and measuring devices that give consistent distances, but the watches could be consistently slow or fast and the measuring devices could be consistently short or long. A 1% error in measuring (1 centimeter), as mentioned in the article, could give an error of 17.6 yards per mile, enough to raise a 3:59.8 to 4:02ish, and how is someone going to run sub-4 on an uneven surface, perhaps even cobblestone or dirt without spikes? Lightly trained athletes can often run low-4 nowadays in high school, so it would be possible in good conditions, but what kind of training was done then? I'd like to believe it; however, it seems incredible. The fact that well-trained athletes couldn't do it in the 100 years after the re-emergence of track races suggests that it didn't happen.
Lewis and Clark did the mile in under four minutes shortly after leaving St. Louis on their epic journey across what is now the United States. It's true.
formerly present wrote:
Making a claim like that would have been incredibly out of character for Landy.
It's worth noting that, maybe a year before his sub-4:00, Bannister was in a mile race wherein one of his partners (Brasher, I think) ran the first two laps in three minutes, then ran his third lap with Bannister (who was running his fourth). Bannister's final time was 4:02ish, IIRC.
The BAAB (or whoever) disallowed the time as a national record because of the "unusual circumstances"--they didn't feel it was a legitimate competition. (Bannister later said that he was glad he hadn't gone under four then--it would have opened up a real can of worms.) Apparently they had no such problem with the circumstances of his first sub-4:00.
Very interesting.
Bannister obviously won the race to break the 4-minute barrier in the public mind, with the help of the British press and other compatriots. And Landy was probably far too gentlemanly to dispute the point. The Commonwealth Games sealed the deal for Bannister, who probably was a much more talented miler than Landy in any event. But I would have preferred Landy as the embodiment of my sport.
This topic has come up at various times in recent years and the answer is quite simple: NO ONE before Bannister ran a legitimate sub-4 minute mile. No one, period. The Radford article is nothing but intriguing speculation--and I don't remotely believe it to be true. The big chief story is also third- or fourth-hand hearsay, without anything like "real" documentation.
"Running a sub-4 minute mile" is more than simply the abstract "ability" to do so. One actually has TO DO it, under reasonably rigorous conditions--and no one before Bannister did so. End of story.
old tymer wrote:
This topic has come up at various times in recent years and the answer is quite simple: NO ONE before Bannister ran a legitimate sub-4 minute mile. No one, period. The Radford article is nothing but intriguing speculation--and I don't remotely believe it to be true. The big chief story is also third- or fourth-hand hearsay, without anything like "real" documentation.
"Running a sub-4 minute mile" is more than simply the abstract "ability" to do so. One actually has TO DO it, under reasonably rigorous conditions--and no one before Bannister did so. End of story.
There’s no disputing that - but it’s lucky that Bannister wore the ‘old school tie’ (a toff who went to the right public schools and university.)
While his blatantly paced time was instantly accepted as the world record - poor old working class Derek Ibbotson ran 3.57.2 in a most competitive race against Olympic 1500mt champion Delaney and world 1500mt record holder Jungwirth in 1957 - and the IAAF refused to recognise his time as a world record - because they considered the race to have been paced!
They did relent some time later, I think after that record had been broken - but poor old Derek’s gallant run had been tarnished by then.
No to 2012 wrote:
The 4 minute mile could have probably been broken in 1946 as opposed to 1954
Gunder Hagg and Arne Anderson (both Swedish) had a fierce rivalry and had a great series of mile races against each other (as opposed to Coe and Ovett) from 42 to 45, taking the world record down from 4.06.2 in 42 to 4.01.4 in 45.
They were both branded as professional in 46 and barred from athletic competition.
In fact, I don’t think the thought of breaking the 4 minute barrier entered their thoughts when they were racing - just beating each other and they went off at suicidal pace with no considerations about even pacing or of the finishing time. Had they have set off with pacemakers, as did Bannister, and ran rather restrained for the first half mile - who knows?
Harbig could also have broken 4 had the war not intervened. 1:46 for 800m stood for 16 years and 2:21 for 1K (when not fully fit) suggest he might have done it.
tri and run wrote:
Big Hawk Chief has a claim for 3:57 from 1876. He did not push the claim himself, it is noted in passing in a US cavalry officers diary. It was not a publicity stunt and only came to light years after the fact, so deception is unlikely.
This is the correct answer. Big Hawk Chief was the first. It wasn't recognized, because people hate injuns.
Jason Rexing was the first.
Alicia Silverstoner wrote:
Or is he the 1st sub-4 minute white miler?
Both.
Who was the first to climb Everest? That is a much more interesting question.
old tymer wrote:
This topic has come up at various times in recent years and the answer is quite simple: NO ONE before Bannister ran a legitimate sub-4 minute mile. No one, period. The Radford article is nothing but intriguing speculation--and I don't remotely believe it to be true. The big chief story is also third- or fourth-hand hearsay, without anything like "real" documentation.
"Running a sub-4 minute mile" is more than simply the abstract "ability" to do so. One actually has TO DO it, under reasonably rigorous conditions--and no one before Bannister did so. End of story.
That depends on what you consider to be "legitimate" and "under reasonably rigorous conditions." I don't think that anyone disputes that Landy's first sub-four met those standards, but did Bannister's? Under the standards of the day, I'm inclined to say no. There's no dispute that Bannister's run was a team effort, and there appears to be considerable doubt that all of the other members of the team made an honest effort to finish the race. That was probably sufficient to get the performance stricken under the standards of the day, and I suspect that Norris and Ross McWhirter (the guys who created "The Guinness Book of World Records")would not have been so willing to accept Bannister's performance as legitimate if they had not been so closely associated with the event (Norris was the timer and announcer). Landy, being the gentleman that he was, never challenged Bannister's claim as the first 4-minute miler, and also recognized that, as a practical matter, Bannister's aided run could not be "undone." But Landy also candidly stated that he always believed that a record should be an individual rather than a team effort, and he would never have used a team to get a record.
Interesting thread, but I'm surprised no one asked this: Who ran the first 4:00.0?????