There were no celebrations on May 9 1970 to mark the 200th anniversary of the first four-minute mile, and no tours were organised to visit the gates of Shoreditch Church in London, where James Parrott, a costermonger, completed his measured mile in four minutes.

He had started at the Charterhouse Wall in Goswell Road, crossed the road, turned right and then ran the length of Old Street for a wager of 15 guineas to five (£1,380 to £460 in 2004 values). Parrott had wagered that he would run inside four minutes, but the men with whips and poles who had been positioned to keep his way clear did such a good job, and the conditions were so near perfect, that as he sped along Old Street it was clear he would be well inside the target time.

But James Parrott appears in no history of athletics and he has never received any recognition from the myriad statisticians and enthusiasts of athletics facts and figures. The truth is that they don't believe it. Way back in 1770, runners must have been third-rate, mustn't they? And those who measured the distance, timed the event, recorded it and reported it to the newspapers, were all probably incompetent in doing their jobs, too, weren't they? An eighteenth-century, four-minute mile, run by a man wearing snug-fitting, thin-leather lace-ups is not to be taken seriously. But the eighteenth-century, four-minute mile story does not end there.

In the late autumn of 1787, a runner by the name of Powell went one crucial stage further. He engaged himself to run a mile in four minutes and wagered the extraordinary sum of 1,000 guineas on achieving it (£780,000 in 2004 values). As part of his preparations, Powell ran a time trial at Moulsey Hurst near Hampton Court five days before Christmas. This was one of the oldest sporting venues in the country, and some of the best cricket and boxing matches and foot races of the previous 50 years had been held on its turf - several under royal patronage.

The purpose of the time trial was to assess his condition and for his backers to make a decision about how they would bet. The trial was a success and the newspapers reported that Powell ran 'within three seconds of the time' (ie within 4:03), but no details have yet come to light about the eventual run. However, it is clear evidence that runners and their backers believed that running a mile in four minutes was possible in 1787 and that they were willing to stake very good money on it.

One of the features of Powell's time trial was that he ran stark naked, as did many serious runners of that time. Naked running is first recorded in 1663 in the reign of Charles II. It continued for 200 years and, in the absence of governing bodies and nationally agreed rules, may well have been a way of trying to emulate the runners at the ancient Olympics.

For the next chapter in the story we have to wait nearly nine years, when another runner, named Weller, also wagered that he could run the mile in four minutes. He was one of three brothers who ran races in the Oxford area, all for money. So confident were they in their ability, they offered to take on any other three runners in England. Their confidence may have been well founded, for, according to the contemporary sporting press, Weller won his mile-in-four-minutes wager by two seconds on October 10 1796. Here, then, is our first report of a sub-four-minute mile: three minutes 58 seconds. The wager was for only three guineas (£170 in 2004 values), well below what the big gamblers of London would have staked, but this relatively small sum would have represented the equivalent of four to five months' work for Weller.

Those who believe that the greatest athletes of all time live today, immediately and almost instinctively dismiss these athletes and their performances. Doesn't the list of current world records prove that today is the golden age of sport and that athletes from an earlier age were barely better than today's schoolboys? No.

A study of nearly 600 races run in the eighteenth century reveals some remarkable times over other distances, too. Take the marathon. Even though it was not standardised at 26 miles 385 yards until 1924, we find the newspapers and sporting magazines of the time frequently report races of 20 to 30 miles, and it is possible to estimate marathon times from these. These include one inside 2hr 10min completed on the streets of London in 1769 by a Swiss runner, and another of about 2hr 11min in 1753, by a runner who was probably Italian. James Appleby was reported to have run 12 miles in 57min in 1730, and Thomas Phillips was only 15sec behind. Both men on other occasions were reported to have run four miles in 18min. There was even a girl of 15 from Kent who ran a mile in 5min 28sec in 1780. All of these times would still be impressive in the twenty-first century, and all, except the girl's time, are of a quality equally as good as a four-minute mile.

It is understandable that we are sceptical about these performances. We know far too little about them, and it is probably better to doubt them than to believe everything that is reported without question.

Nevertheless, we should be sure of our ground when we do so. We should not assume, for example, that distances could not be measured accurately in the eighteenth century. In 1770, when Parrott was reported to have run a mile in four minutes, distances were routinely measured using agricultural chains that were accurate to a centimetre or so, and any reader of Dava Sobel's Longitude also knows that they could measure time very accurately. So the technology existed to measure Parrott's distance and time to the necessary accuracy.

Another important factor is that the runners of the eighteenth century almost always ran for wagers, one party against another. It was the custom for each side to appoint an umpire and if the umpires could not agree they appointed a referee whose decision was final. Whatever anyone else thought about it, the two sides in the wager both agreed that the measurement of distance and time were right.

The fact that they could measure distance and time accurately does not mean that they always did. Both sides might have agreed that a few yards' error or a few seconds here or there mattered little. But if we take one runner's performances at different times and in different places, and over different distances, and compare them with what is known today about athletic ability and the physiological characteristics of distance runners, we find that whatever errors the two parties were willing to overlook must have been very small.

Take, for example, a Geordie runner by the name of Pinwire (or Pinwherie), who was said to have won 102 races between 1729 and 1733. Only two of his results have survived. One was 10 miles in 52min 03sec in 1733, and another was 12 miles in 64min in 1738.

With what we know today about the athletic and physiological characteristics of runners, we can see that his 12-mile time is entirely consistent with his earlier 10-mile time. If Pinwire's 10-mile time was contaminated by an error in measuring the distance or the time or both, there must have been another error in measuring time or distance or both that almost exactly 'balanced' it several years later when he ran his 12-mile time. The statistical chances of this happening are small.

For the athletes for whom we have three consistent performances, the chances of the results containing such perfectly balanced errors is even smaller, and there are several athletes for whom many more results than this exist. One athlete has 20 performances, all of which are athletically and physiologically consistent. The chances that these are consistent because of errors that cancel each other out are almost nil. In this way it is possible to rehabilitate a whole century of previously overlooked athletes and radically change our view of the quality of athletes from the past.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that athletes who lived before the internal combustion engine were physically fit and capable of great feats. Racehorses of 250 years ago are believed to have run as fast as they do today. Why not the athletes, particularly when they were motivated by large sums of money and took it seriously?

On the balance of the evidence, the report of Parrott's run should be accepted rather than rejected, but it still comes as something of a surprise. Part of the problem is that we have grown up with the idea that since Victorian times records have risen phenomenally, and that performances before that were poor to the point of being derisory.

The Victorians, who first codified and controlled the new sport of athletics, rowing and other sports, were ideologically driven to exclude large sections of society. It was the political correctness of the age to exclude anyone who wasn't an 'amateur', and so all those who ran or rowed for money out of necessity or choice were instantly eliminated.

Before the Amateur Athletic Association became the controlling force of athletics in 1880, men and women of all social classes ran for money on the streets and on the moors and greens of England. Later, the sport was policed to eliminate the undesirables who ran for money, or whose jobs tainted them and rendered them 'professionals'. They also excluded women.

The new political correctness also caused writers to airbrush out the professionals of the past and to start a new page of athletics. For them the sport began in Exeter College, Oxford in 1850, untainted by the runners who had run for money for at least 200 years previously. For a while, two sets of records were kept and these can still be seen and compared in the 1888 work British Rural Sports by JH Walsh, who wrote under the pseudonym Stonehenge. They confirm that one of the motivating forces behind the new amateur athletics was that there were many middle-class men who wanted to take part in sport but who were 'far from being good enough to hold their own in professional company'. If you can't beat them, exclude them.

The new amateur records were almost always poorer than the professional equivalents, but soon the professionals' records were not listed at all. Half a century later they had been forgotten and one historian of amateur athletics dismissed all pre-Victorian performances as 'clearly nonsense'.

This move to keep athletics pure and free from the contamination of money had a big effect on the history of the four-minute mile. Any runner who wanted to take the time to train and run seriously and needed money to do it, was systematically removed from the scene.

The greatest British miler of the late-Victorian age, Walter George, was forced out this way. Between the wars the Frenchman Jules Ladoumègue (the first man to beat 3min 50sec for the 1500 metres) and the Flying Finn, Paavo Nurmi, the greatest runner of his age, were also disqualified for not complying strictly with amateur rules. In 1945, two great Swedes, Gunder Hägg and Arne Anderson, had brought the mile record to within 1.4sec and 1.6sec respectively of the four-minute barrier. But these, too, were disqualified by zealous officials still on the lookout for violations of the amateur code. Had these great runners been permitted to continue in their sport, as athletes of an earlier and later age had, the course of modern athletics history would almost certainly have been different

By the time the above athletes had been excluded from their sport, the amateur officials had also decreed that records would be recognised only if completed on a track measuring 400 metres or 440 yards in length and, with the restrictions on venue and money, it is little wonder that athletes from a freer age were totally overlooked.

Parrott, Powell and Weller ran on roads and parkland that may not always have been level. And so on 6 May 1954, almost exactly 184 years after James Parrott's first four-minute mile, Roger Bannister became the first amateur to run a mile in four minutes on a flat, level 440-yard track. It was an immense achievement, particularly when all the restrictions imposed on him by the officials who policed the amateur sport, are considered. It should not, however, overshadow the achievements of those pioneers who went before, men who dreamed of, and may well have achieved, the four-minute mile more than 150 years earlier, but who did it for money.

Peter Radford is professor of Sports Science at Brunel University, a double Olympic medallist and author of 'The Celebrated Captain Barclay'. He was chairman of the British Athletic Federation for six years