[kaffekaka]

I read this one: https://www.scienceofrunning.com/2017/05/the-roger-bannister...

With for example: "What this shows us is that the issue wasn’t massively psychological. If it was, we would have seen athletes running 1,500m races much faster than their corresponding mile time. Instead, we see that the progression matches up nicely. People were stuck on 4 minutes at the same time they were stuck on 3:43. Do we really think that runners were stuck on a mythical 3:43.0 barrier?"

In case you don't want to read it, it says that other distances had similar "breakthroughs" but they were not associated with a mental barrier like "4 minute mile". Rather, the article argues, the development may have been related to WW2.

Edit: it just so happened that for mile running, the stagnation after WW2 occured just around the four minute mark. You need to look at other distances and perhaps even other sports to see the pattern.

Indeed, my country Sweden won the olympic football/soccer in 1948 - a result widely regarded as being due to other countries have sent all their young men to the war while Sweden stayed neutral/did not fight the germans.