True, but don’t discount the pre-requisite for the runner to be an amateur.
Between the Wars very handy athletes like the Frenchman Ladoumègue and the Finn Paavo Nurmi has world record attempts at the mile on Olympic standard tracks disqualified because officials deemed they were in violation of the amateur code.
Which has nothing to do with whether or not he did it. You’ve brought up this story before yet despite the claim he ran sub 4, you never stated the time he ran. I found several stories, all making the claim yet only that gave a time-four flat.
None gave any indication of how accurately the course was measured, nor the terrain or elevation change. Nothing how the starting signal was transmitted to the finish or if the timepiece was transported to the finish ahead of the runner.
Yep, even included the cite.
I don’t see that Peter Radford (btw 100m bronze medalist in Rome) would have an axe favouring athletes or earlier centuries though his citation when inducted into the England Athletics Hall of Fame in 2016 includes “He is acknowledged as THE expert on 18th century athletics” (their capitalisation), whatever that’s worth.
Radford’s point is that the race was a wager and so all parties had vested interests to agree that the measurement of distance and time were right.
The actual time is not known. But he collected his wager on the basis he ran the mile inside four minutes, whether by 1 second or more. Those who had their hard earned against him paid up.
The course was along the paved streets from Goswell Road then along Old Road, Shoreditch until it’s end at Hackney Road. After the RH turn the course along Old St is essentially straight, and inclined down. It’s not an Olympic course.
As to the timing method, an interesting thing is that on the corner of Old and Hackney Roads is St Leonard’s Church built in 1740. The nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons” about the sounds of London bells peels includes the Church of Shoreditch being rendered as “when I grow rich”. So taking poetic licence Parrott could have started on Goswell when the bells of Shoreditch struck and the timing could be already at the finishing line. I don’t know whether the bit over 4 seconds the sound would have taken from St Leonards to reach Goswell Road was allowed for.
The article also cites in 1787 a professional runner named Powell ran a mile in 4 minutes and 3 seconds at Moulsey Hurst (which was an established cricket ground, so may have been on a circular track) in preparation for an attempt on the 4-minute mile where he’d backed himself at 1,000 guineas on achieving it (£780,000 in 2004 values). For staking the equivalent of about 1mil USD you’d reckon he’d have to be pretty confident.
A third cite is in 1796 that a runner named Weller, also wagered that he could run the mile in four minutes and won the race in three minutes 58 seconds.
I think he makes a sound case.
Further; had Roger Bannister run the same course through Shoreditch with Chris Brasher and Chris Chitaway as pacers and windbreaks he’d have done it a whole lot better than 3:59.4
An interesting to side note to Banister’s record set at Oxford; the timekeeper was Harold Abrahams (100m gold medalist in Paris 1924 and Chariots of Fire fame)
No one ever refers to the race as anything other than “a marathon”. People say “I ran a 5K, I ran a 10K, I ran a marathon”.