Up to the finishing line, time 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, shattering the 4-minute mile, the Everest of athletic achievement.

A great reception for the young medical student who had cut two whole seconds of Gunda Haug's world record set up nine years ago.

I'm very glad to have done it in Oxford because this was the track on which I ran my

first mile race in my life about seven years ago when I first came up to Oxford.

The second is that throughout the winter I've been watching the newspapers

seeing whether Landy

would do it first or whether Santee would do it first in America. And I'm very glad that it

has come from England in the end. For nearly 70 years, the four-minute mile has stood as one of

the great dividing lines in sports, a threshold that for many decades only men had crossed.

But now, researchers say, perhaps for the first time, that a woman could do the same.

A new study published in Royal Society Open Science suggests that Faith Kipiagon, the fastest female

miler in history, could, under optimal conditions,

run a mile in three minutes and 59.37 seconds. It would be an achievement on par with Roger

Bannister's record-breaking run in 1954. And it would mark a turning point not just in track and field,

but in how we understand the limits of human

performance. Today, the science, the star, and what it would take to make history.

We'll be right back.

This episode of the City of Smack Podcast is presented by Runa.

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