SportsFact0 interactions

On 6 May 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds at Oxford. The four-minute mile had been treated as a wall. Within weeks, someone else ran faster, and then the barrier became a result people expected. The interesting part is not the watch. It is how quickly a limit, once broken in public, stops looking like a law.

Once a public limit is broken, other people cross it as if it had been ordinary.

Roger Bannister · Encyclopaedia Britannica · 1954 · Factapp