It was a travesty—two travesties, actually, separate but inextricably linked. In May 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, a challenge that had killed more than a dozen people in the preceding decades and that scientists had once declared impossible. The catch: They breathed canisters of pure oxygen, an aid that the Everest pioneer George Mallory—one of those who died on the mountain—had once dismissed as “a damnable heresy.”

A month later, a young British medical trainee named Roger Bannister just missed running the first sub-four-minute mile, another long-standing barrier sometimes dubbed “Everest on the track.” But he did it in a race where his training partner let himself be lapped in order to pace Bannister all the way t

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