The four minute mile, in athletics, is the running of a mile (1,609.344 metres) in under four minutes. It was once thought by some to be impossible but has now been achieved by many male athletes, and is now the standard of all professional middle distance runners. In the last 50 years the 4 minute barrier has been lowered by almost 17 seconds. Still, it remains the standard by which all male amateur milers, including American college milers, are measured.

On May 6, 1954, the Englishman Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile in recorded history at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds at the Iffley Road Track in Oxford, England. Six weeks later, John Landy, an Australian, followed suit with 3:57.9, breaking Bannister's record. In November, 2005, Forbes magazine declared after interviewing a number of sports experts that Bannister's four minute mile was "the greatest athletic achievement" of all time.

During the fiftieth anniversary of Roger Bannister's run, the British athlete Ken Wood claimed that he broke four minutes four weeks before Bannister, in a training event. However, this is controversial, and a former editor of Athletics Weekly, Mel Watman, has written a letter of complaint to the magazine for running the story.

In 2005, a film was made about Roger Bannister's triumph entitled Four Minutes and aired on ESPN