Roger Bannister ran a mile round the University of Oxford athletics track in three minutes 59.4 seconds. Seventy years to the day on from that seismic moment, hundreds of us gathered in front of Christ Church Oxford,

Sebastian Coe’s description of the doctor’s record-breaking run in 1954 underlines its enduring significance 70 years later

It was as if Mount Everest had been relocated to Oxford – and we could watch it being climbed,” recalls the historian Peter Whitfield, who was only six in 1954 when, exactly a year after Edmund Hillary scaled the planet’s highest peak,

Two-hour marathon has become the modern four-minute mile, with the outdoor mark of 3:43.13 set by Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999 still standing a quarter of a century on