Angus my younger brother had his birthday on Wednesday, and we met up in Sandyford House for the usual. It was towards the end of the night when we got talking about athletics which, trust me, is not his best subject, and I was selling him the idea of the World Championships in Eugene, Oregon ,in July.
“Steve Prefontaine country”.
“Ah, go Pre!” he says back.
It always amazes me how people with only a passing interest in this sport can tell you something or else everything about Steve Prefontaine. Even today, 50 years after his only one truly famous race, Prefontaine is probably the most recognised name in American distance running. Ask any high school or college runner from New York to San Francisco to name his or her running idol and chances are they’ll say Steve Prefontaine, or else just Pre.
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Pre died in a car accident 47 years ago this Monday – in the early hours of May 30th, 1975. He was 24 years old. That wasn’t yet three years after his first and only Olympic appearance in Munich, in 1972, where he finished fourth in the 5,000m, narrowly outsprinted for bronze by Britain’s Ian Stewart. He’d run from the front for most of the last four laps and was inconsolable at the finish. Lasse Viren won it.
Still, for a runner who never won a major championship medal, or broke a world record for that matter, Pre’s name not only lives on strong; his spirit too continues to breathe life into American distance running,
There will be ample evidence of that at Saturday’s Prefontaine Classic, the third and only American stop of the 2022 Diamond League. Suitably billed as a sort of teaser event for those World Championships, set for the same revamped Hayward Field at the University of Oregon beginning July 15th, the headline event will be the Bowerman Mile, named after Prefontaine’s properly legendary coach Bill Bowerman, where America’s best milers will look to prove they’re a match for the very best, including Olympic 1,500m champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen
The World Championships in July will be the first on American ground, and Eugene was chosen for good reason, for years now known as the track capital of America and in many ways thanks to Pre.
This is Steve Prefontaine country, though born and raised on the coastal state city of Coos Bay, his home track too. Hayward Field is where Pre made a name for himself, the first American runner to win four NCAA titles in one event, and also ran his last race too, winning the 5,000m a matter of hours before crashing his gold MG into a rocky roadside ditch while returning from a celebratory party in the hills outside Eugene. Pre was pinned beneath the wreck of his own car and pronounced dead at the scene.
I remember showing up at my freshman year in college in America in 1990 and having no clue about him until being handed down a tattered copy of Tom Jordan’s Pre, the 1977 biography subtitled The Story of America’s Greatest Running Legend. Part of the appeal it seemed to me was that here was a runner of not extraordinary talent who went to considerable lengths to get the absolute best out of himself. He ran every race as if it were his last, so they said –- you look back at pictures of him now and it appears that way.
His enduring legacy may also be explained by the fact Pre was the subject of not one but two Hollywood feature films based entirely on his brief running career: the 1997 Disney production Prefontaine and the 1998 Warner Brothers production Without Limits, produced by Tom Cruise and directed by Robert Towne of Chinatown fame.
Most runners have their own opinion about these two films, whether Jared Leto best captured the part in Prefontaine, or Billy Crudup did in Without Limits. Thanks to Donald Sutherland playing the part of Bill Bowerman the latter gets my nod.
They’re both fitting, though ,because in ways Pre is to American distance running what James Dean is to American cinema. “Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints,” he once said, “I like to make something beautiful when I run. I like to make people stop and say, ‘I’ve never seen anyone run like that before.’ It’s more than just a race. It’s style.”
When the 1972 US Olympic trials were staged at Hayward Field, Pre was the headline act. Wearing a pair of Bowerman’s custom-built Nike, first designed in 1971 and now decorated with a “swoosh”, he did not disappoint, winning the 5,000m in an American record 13:22.8, earning his ticket straight to Munich.
“I think if it comes down to a true-run race then I’m the only one that can win,” he said of his Olympic ambitions. As it transpired it wasn’t quite a true-run race, Pre ending up fourth despite giving himself every chance to win gold.
Ian Stewart never liked being reminded he was the runner to deny Pre that bronze medal. Already a European champion from 1969, and a year before I was named after him, Stewart only passed Pre in the last few strides, though proved his class several times afterwards, winning a European Indoor/World Cross-Country double in 1975.
There is a sense among some American distance runners that Pre is perhaps over-rated. None of his contemporaries knew him better than Frank Shorter, who won the Olympic marathon in Munich in 1972, by over two minutes, and finished second behind Pre in that last race at Hayward Field on May 29th, 1975.
He was also the last person to see Pre alive. When Shorter was on holiday in Galway four years ago, I reminded him of all that, his compliment of Pre entirely unreserved – Shorter pretty sure Pre would have won a medal in Montreal in 1976 had he lived to run there.
“Physically he was just starting to mature, was just at the age that we know male and female athletes start to peak,” Shorter told me. “And we know his records were set basically when he was still a growing boy. And right before he died he came to Colorado to train with me because I think he know that I was on to something with the altitude training. And also he realised he’d made a mistake in Europe, and wanted to figure out how to race differently.
“Unfortunately he was still so young, and he’s in the Olympic final, and he’s telling people how he’s going to run the race, run the last four laps in under four minutes. You don’t do that. I remember Ian Stewart hearing that and saying ‘so?’ Mentally, if not physically, he would have only got better.”
Still he breathes life into American distance running. Go Pre!
