I was just looking at the best one-mile running race times in history, inspired by my own ‘best’ one-mile time of around 7 minutes 30 seconds. Below is a list of the fastest fifty one-miles ever run. British runners are highlighted, because patriotic.
[Raw data from WorldAthletics.org]
Looking deeper, only two of the fastest fifty one-miles run in history have been recorded since the end of 2009.
Looking at the athletes in the top one hundred fastest times list:
There are a lot of Kenyans (18) represented, but Great Britain (6) is in second place for national representation in the top 100 fastest times list.
15 of the fastest 100 one-mile times were recorded by 6 British athletes, 29 by 18 Kenyan athletes.
Hicham el Guerrouj (Morocco) has seven of the top ten mile times in history, all from between 1997 and 2001, and as of Feb 2021, he still holds the world record…after over twenty years.
Looking at the dates when these top 100 times were set, the average date of was 4th January 1997, so 24 years ago.
GB’s Steve Cram remains the fourth fastest miler in history after 35 years!
The distribution of the fastest 100 times over the decades is shown below. Clearly the mile has fallen out of fashion since its heyday.
