Any 15-year-old teenager can tell you there is a frustratingly-long list of things you cannot do. Can’t drink. Can’t drive. Can’t vote. Can’t take out a loan to buy a car to drive to a pub to buy a drink or drive to a polling booth to vote even if you were allowed to do any of those other things.
One thing you can do, however, is break four minutes for the mile. Nothing stopping you at all on that one. Except, of course, for the fact no-one has ever done it. Not until 19 March 2025, that is. Now New Zealand super-teen Sam Ruthe has only gone and done it, hasn’t he. At Auckland’s Mt Smart Stadium, Ruthe wedged himself firmly between pacemakers Sam Tanner and Ben Wall and ran four laps and 9.34 metres of the 400-metre track in 3:58.35 (Tanner 3:58.29, Wall 3:59.00).
Like John Landy, Sam Ruthe had approached four minutes before his barrier-breaking run. His previous best 4:01.72 had come at another of New Zealand’s historic venues, Cooks Gardens in Whanganui where Peter Snell snipped 0.1 seconds off Herb Elliott’s previous mark with a 3:54.4 mile in 1962.
Again like Landy, who ran 3:57.9 in his world record run, Ruthe took a healthy slice out of four minutes when he did break through.
Unlike Landy, however, Ruthe did not have to endure a lengthy wait before going sub-4. He ran his previous best on 27 January this year and now here he is at 3:58.35 just short of two months later. Landy re-ignited the world’s chase for a sub-4-minute mile when he ran 4:02.1 in December 1952 but it was a further 18 months – and numerous ‘failures’ – before he broke through on 21 June 1954.
When you’re just 15, of course, you don’t have to wait long for anything. Ruthe was just 24 days short of his sixteenth birthday (12 April, same day as Landy) but it’s doubtful he was feeling the same degree of time pressure that come with a string of unsuccessful attempts. Of course he is the only man to break four minutes before his sixteenth birthday while he would have to share the achievement of doing it aged 16 with the likes of Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Cameron Myers.
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And having mentioned Herb Elliott just before, it’s instructive to look at his junior record. For a man who effectively retired at the age of 22, he didn’t really have a long senior career. And his junior days consisted almost entirely of school events – there were no Australian national junior titles and few at state level back then. On top of that Elliott lost virtually a full year when a broken foot – the result of dropping a piano on it! – sidelined him throughout most of 1956.
Elliott did notch two significant junior victories in races staged as South Australian state junior titles at the national championships in Adelaide in 1955. He beat Ron Clarke over a mile – 4:20.8 to 4:20.9 – and also won 880 yards in 1:55.8. He first broke four minutes in Melbourne in January 1958, running 3:59.9 just a month short of his twentieth birthday. From there he took off like a rocket and ended the year as world record holder in both the mile and 1500 metres and Empire Games champion in the mile and 880 all in the next seven months.
Part of the jaw-dropping reaction to Ruthe’s run is that we are still conditioned to think that four minutes is some sort of benchmark of world-class mile running. That may have been understandable when no-one had done it: now, hundreds have, yet the old mathematics of four laps of the track, one minute per lap still holds us under its spell. Roger Bannister and John Landy ran the first sub-fours 71 years ago for heavens sake. We don’t accord the records in any other event from that era with anything like the reverence we bestow on the four-minute mile. Now that 15-year-olds are doing it, perhaps it’s time to move on.
Hicham El Guerrouj has held the world record for 26 years at 3:43.13. He did that in Rome in 1999 and is now 50 years old. It may not have the mathematical elegance of four minutes, but let’s crack on to the 3:40 barrier.
