On a beautiful spring day, Jay Farr sits by a lake near his home town of Coos Bay, Oregon, and reminisces about his old friend. ‘He tried basketball, but he wasn’t very tall so gave that up. He tried swimming, but almost drowned. He tried [American] football but he wasn’t particularly big and it was kind of painful,’ Farr pauses, admiring the sun glistening on the water and a brace of ospreys spiralling through the clear, cyan sky. ‘So that kind of led him to running.’
Farr grew up just a block away from Steve Prefontaine. The pair shared the same grade school, middle school and high school. So, too, a love of the sport that ‘Pre’ would go on to shape so profoundly, both in the US and beyond. Like the brace of ospreys, the two would play together yet also compete, vying for supremacy. ‘I have memories of us sprinting between telephone poles. I used to jot down the times,’ says Farr, wistfully. ‘Steve had a natural ability – but he also created an ability with a lot of hard work.’
Farr is 74 and still running – albeit on two artificial knees. If fate had played a different hand, it’s not hard to conceive of the pair, contented septuagenarians both, sitting here together by this lake chewing the fat. And if the estimations of the community of Coos Bay, indeed much of the state of Oregon, are to be believed, one of them would be doing so as the greatest American athlete of all time.
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But the hand fate dealt Pre was a singularly cruel one. In the early hours of 30 May 1975, after a track meet at the University of Oregon’s now hallowed Hayward Field, he lost control of his MGB convertible which crashed and overturned, pinning him to the pavement. He was 24 and indisputably in his prime – at the time of his death, he held the American record for every distance from 2000m to 10,000m.
The previous evening, in a characteristically exuberant performance in the 5000m in front of an adoring crowd of 7,000, he’d beaten his friend and reigning Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter and an international field he’d helped assemble. His winning time of 13:23.8 was the second fastest time in American history, a moustache’s width off his own record. The Montreal Olympics the following year was firmly in Pre’s sights and few doubted that it was a Games he was going to light up.
‘Untimely’ is the adjective used most often for Pre’s death – a word that feels strikingly underpowered for the snuffing out of such a primal, propulsive force of nature. It’s a staple of eulogies to those who die young to declare that they packed more into their short lives than many manage in their full complement of years. But in Pre’s case, this was irrefutably true.
It starts with the athletic accomplishments, of course. That spellbinding spread of national records, one set while he was still at high school in Coos Bay. His 35-3 win record in the mile at Hayward Field. His three NCAA Cross Country Championships and four national three-mile titles, claimed while at the University of Oregon. In his only Olympic appearance, in Munich in 1972 as a callow but courageous 21-year-old who commentator David Coleman likened to an ‘athletics Beatle’, he missed out on bronze by just 0.64 seconds.
‘Most people would say that if he had run for third, he probably would have gotten a bronze that day,’ says Farr. But that wasn’t his way. ‘He was running for first.’ And therein lies the crux of the Pre legend. Athletic accomplishments, however luminous and all-encompassing, don’t sustain legacies for half a century or more. But the manner of them can. And Pre’s fearless, frontrunner style – ‘Somebody may beat me but they are going to have to bleed to do it,’ he once said – gave him a transcendent quality that won him fans far beyond the passionate but narrow confines of athletics fandom in 1970s America.
‘I didn’t have the chance to see him run in person, but seeing footage of his races here in Oregon, he had this really captivating running style,’ says Lauren Goss, athletics archivist at the University of Oregon. ‘Even when I know the outcome, it’s still such fun to watch. The way he runs, it’s fiercely competitive. It’s engaging. There’s a quote in which Pre spoke about running as an art and I can see that in his racing. Listen to the audio and you can hear the fans in the stands as well and there’s this kind of reciprocity and synergy of energy.’
A keen runner herself – who isn’t in ‘TrackTown USA’? – Goss, 36, is charmingly thrilled about the perks of her job at the university. It puts her at the epicentre of America’s distance-running heritage, with access to some of its most prized exhibits.
Among these is part of the hand-written eulogy delivered at Pre’s funeral by Bill Bowerman, the American track and field coach and co-founder of Nike. During his 24 years at the University of Oregon, the Ducks track and field team (named for the mascot of the university) had a winning season every year but one and Bowerman took ‘the little champ’, as he called him, under his wing.
The black ink is spidery, with strike-throughs and rough annotations betraying the haste of its creation; Pre’s was not a eulogy anyone expected to be giving in the mid-1970s. Bowerman’s affection and respect for a man he first encountered as a precociously talented 14-year-old is unmistakeable. Pre ‘burned’ with two desires, he writes: to be the best; and to achieve what Bowerman calls ‘emancipation’ for the US athlete.
His rebel quality and an outspoken disregard for authority were two of Pre’s more endearing traits and he never lost his blue-collar frustration and impatience with officialdom. This was channelled towards a deserving foe in the form of the American Athletics Union (AAU), which in the early 1970s was insisting on imposing antediluvian standards of amateurism on impoverished runners from which it materially benefited. Pre, who reportedly turned down a six-figure sum to keep his Olympics dream alive, was forced to get by bartending in his spare time. He lived in a trailer adjacent to Eugene’s Willamette River for much of his university career. ‘Amateurism should have been kicked out in 1920,’ he once said.
His persistence and willingness to embrace ‘difficult communication’, reads the eulogy, paved the way for the professionalism runners today take for granted. And it was through his partnership with Bowerman’s nascent sportswear empire – for which he played a dual role of poster boy and pioneering salesman – that he took the high-pressure hose of corporatisation to those dusty amateur ideals.
Nike, with Bowerman at the helm, signed Pre on a $5,000 annual contract in 1974 and the brand got a lot more than a thoroughbred show pony on which to exhibit its innovative footwear. Pre took his frontrunner’s energy and maverick zeal and blended this with the skills that he acquired while majoring in communications. He hit upon a novel form of direct marketing – sending out shoes to aspiring elite athletes, with handwritten notes. Flattered by the attention and impressed by the product, many adopted the brand as their own.
One pair was to find its way into the hands of a namesake of Steve Prefontaine – a promising teen from Jarrow, in North East England, who was only just beginning to appreciate the full potency of the Pre legend.
Sole to soul
‘Whether or not they were Pre’s shoes, I’ve no idea,’ remembers Steve Cram. ‘But that’s what I was told by Bren and they were certainly about his size.’ ‘Bren’ – Brendan Foster, the 5000m European champion and something of a mentor to the Jarrow teen – was just back from racing in the States. He handed over the pair of prototype Nike running shoes, in the yellow and green colours of Oregon University with the now-famous waffle sole, given to him by Pre. The older man, who would go on to win bronze in the 10,000m at the 1976 Olympics, had signed with Adidas so couldn’t wear them. He also thought that the shoes would provide an extra spur to his elegant-striding, 15-year-old protégé.
‘I ran all my road races in them for about a year and they were dead cool,’ says Cram, now a leading athletics commentator. ‘I’m still convinced I had the first pair of Nikes in the UK.’ Despite the link, it took a while for him to fall under the spell of the Prefontaine story. He knew about some of the performances and had read about Pre’s death that year in the newspapers. But he was an ocean away, in a pre-internet age. And the emergence of himself, Seb Coe and Steve Ovett in the UK over the subsequent years was to swing the middle-distance pendulum back across the Atlantic to Britain.
It wasn’t until Cram signed for Nike and became close with John Gregorio – a contemporary of Prefontaine with a similar predilection for shaggy hair and a statement moustache who’d started working for the embryonic sportswear company – that he began to learn about his namesake’s exploits and already-burgeoning legacy.
‘Gregorio became a good friend of mine,’ says Cram. ‘I remember he sent me to Boulder, in Colorado, for the first time to train. It must have been the winter of 1979/1980. And he started filling in the picture about the aura of Prefontaine.
‘Pre was renowned for going to the front. His modus operandi, if you like, was to get out there and make everybody hurt. A bit like Foster and our own Dave Bedford – but Pre had a way of kind of wearing that on his sleeve. I never saw him run in person but from the stuff that I’ve seen and heard about… he made it look good.’
Fortuitously, the era in which Pre was putting on a show coincided with an exponential increase in potential viewers, thanks to the advent of colour television. ‘By the time you get to the early 1970s, the amount of people who had colour TVs had increased massively,’ recalls Cram. ‘We didn’t have one, but when Sunderland won the FA Cup final in 1973, I remember going to our neighbour’s house to watch it because they did. You can’t underestimate the power of being able to watch live sports in colour at that time – and it meant characters such as Pre could grab people’s attention and imagination.’
As for the shoes, Cram outgrew them long before his golden period in the early to mid-1980s when he set world records in the 1500m, 2000m and the mile and won a world title and Olympic silver in the 1500m. They sat in the back of his cupboard for a few years and then one day – with a flagrant lack of prescience for the now-booming market in both vintage footwear and ‘Premorabilia’ – he gave them away at Jarrow athletics club.
He laughs at the recollection of his casual largesse: ‘I remember for the Olympics in 2012, I was hosting a dinner for some visitors on a boat and I told that story. And one of them was from Japan, where the market in that sort of stuff is massive. I won’t tell you what they said those shoes would have been worth.’
For an astonishing 39 years, Cram held the British mile record. When it was broken, last May, it was by a Scot with a certain Prefontaine swagger of his own – and at the track and field meet in Eugene that bears the Oregonian’s name: the Pre Classic.
‘It’s such a prestigious event,’ says 1500m world champion and Olympic silver medallist Josh Kerr. ‘For it to be the biggest event in the US and be named after him… it was such an honour to win there. Bucket-list stuff.’
Having attended university in America (New Mexico) and now racing for a US team (Brooks Beasts), Kerr is both a keen student and enthusiastic proponent of Pre folklore. For aspiring athletes in the US, he says, it’s a name that carries the weight of a Roger Bannister here in the UK. ‘To still be spoken about and referenced 50 years later shows you the impact he had on the sport,’ says Kerr. ‘There aren’t many athletes, or indeed sportspeople, who’ve had that effect.’
‘The guy was a machine for quotes,’ adds Kerr. ‘That’s really helped him to stick around for as long as he has because his words were brilliant, so a lot of people take inspiration from that and I’m one of those people.’
I put it to Kerr that with his confidence, directness and ‘sport as spectacle’ ethos, he’s something of a 21st-century successor to Prefontaine. The Scot demurs – but concedes that he would have relished the chance to line up against Bowerman’s ‘little champ’, preferably at a Hayward Field fizzing with track-night energy. Pre, we can be sure, would have accepted the challenge in a heartbeat.
‘You couldn’t ask for a better opponent or a potentially more exciting race,’ says Kerr. ‘What I want to do in my career is race the most exciting athletes and go up against them and beat them. We’re missing that a bit nowadays, but Pre always relished it.’
Local hero
Around 75 miles as the osprey flies separate Eugene and Coos Bay, the two principal stages on which the drama of Pre’s life played out. Today, the former is a truly terrible location in which to try to show off your own running pedigree; the city has a population of around 180,000 and by common consensus, around 90% of those are runners. High-calibre runners, too.
Many can be found gliding round Pre’s Trail – a dedicated, bark-covered running path through Eugene’s Alton Baker Park, with loops from one mile to 10,000m, that was established in 1975 in the dark days that followed Pre’s death. Slogging along here, it’s not uncommon to have a Cole Hocker or another Olympic, World or national champion breeze past.
‘There isn’t a day or time of day when you don’t see runners in this town. It’s pretty wild,’ says JB Carney, a senior sports director for Eugene-based marketing agency Travel Lane County. ‘And whenever we host a major meet it’s amazing how much busier the trails get. Our current mayor is a former University of Oregon track athlete and it’s not uncommon to see her out jogging. We joke that it’s not just that your barber, bartender or barista are runners; in many instances they’re also Olympians or former Olympians. And many of them probably moved here because of Pre – and because they grew up idolising him.’
Eugene’s running heritage was already substantive prior to Steve Prefontaine’s arrival at the University of Oregon in 1969, having been swayed by a letter Bowerman wrote asserting that he would turn him into the world’s greatest distance runner. Venerated track and field coach Bill Hayward had built a culture of excellence over nearly half a century. But Pre’s arrival added a national spotlight – and his passing, an international one.
Few visitors today fail to make the pilgrimage to Pre’s Rock, around a mile east of Hayward Field, near the scene of the fatal car accident. ‘PRE 5-30-75 RIP’ is graffitied on the rock, around which it’s customary to leave spikes, medals, race numbers – any token of respect. But Coos Bay, Pre’s hometown, is where he’s buried – in his Olympic kit beneath a sky-blue tombstone in Sunset Memorial Park, to the south of town. ‘He raced through life now rests in peace,’ reads the simple inscription.
To say the small, tight-knit coastal community is gearing up for the 50th anniversary of their most famous son’s death is wholly inaccurate. This isn’t a place that needs an arbitrary accumulation of years to muster the energy to remember. Pre is part of the very foundations; his legend writ large. Oversized murals confront the visitor, cataloguing the various stages of his short-lived career, from clean-shaven high-school tyro to long-haired, moustached Olympian. There are statues and plaques. A permanent exhibit is on show at the art museum. And every third Saturday in September the town hosts its very own version of the Pre Classic – the Prefontaine Memorial 10K run.
The course traces some of the roads on which he trained, culminating at Marshfield High School, where his gift for running – by a process of elimination, if Jay Farr is to be believed – was discovered.
‘Steve is omnipresent in this community,’ says Carmen Matthews, a town councillor and co-owner of the 7 Devils Brewery – a warm-up jog from the Prefontaine childhood family home. Matthews, 42, isn’t a runner; not everyone here is. Yet such is Pre’s transcendent quality, it hardly matters. For Matthews, the true resonance of the man lies in his hard-nosed relatability: the relentless battler who simply refused to countenance mediocrity.
‘He once said that “to give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift” – and that’s surely what we all strive for,’ says Matthews. ‘To really do our best and celebrate the chance we are all given in whatever realm. It goes beyond running. It’s about spirit.’
Not fade away
Half a century on, the Pre story is as well-trodden as the bark on that Eugene running trail created in his name. Those fleeting, coruscating years have been pored over and every conceivable blank filled in and awkward edge filed down. The legacy is entrenched and the narrative simplified: Pre represented a fork in the road for the sport of running, which has gone on to enjoy a stratospheric rise via a succession of booms. Two eras, if you like: Prefontaine and Postfontaine.
All of which makes objective analysis of the man’s achievements increasingly difficult. And awkward. It’s in our nature to mythologise those who go early – part sympathy, part inclination towards Panglossian hero-worship. But as with politicians, most sporting careers ultimately end in failure, or at least decline and disappointment. We never got to witness that with Pre – nor, perhaps, the injuries and underperformances; the questionable commercial deals or injudicious chat show appearances; the controversies in which this fast-living, forthright character may well have become entangled. His death compartmentalised his life; ‘what was’ was supplanted by the far more seductive ‘what could have been’.
In a cruel mirroring of the Pre story, a few days after Christmas in 1976 Belgian middle-distance runner Ivo Van Damme – double silver medallist in that summer’s Olympics in Montreal – was also killed in a car crash. The parallels extended to the inauguration of a memorial meet in Brussels, still held every year in his memory.
‘Ivo was a phenomenal athlete. An incredible talent,’ remembers Cram. ‘Even though he won Olympic medals and died young there isn’t the same mythology around him.’ So what’s the difference? ‘I think it was that Pre was the epitome of the American dream – the sportsman that everybody wanted to be. He was illustrative, somehow, of the freewheeling spirit. A product of the 1960s and 1970s – that almost hippie style of running on pure talent.
‘But it’s become hard to separate the two sides of Prefontaine: the athlete versus the myth that sort of grew up around him. As athletes we tend to look at the facts. “OK, how fast did he run?” And “who did he beat?” But of course, he never reached his potential.’
It seems impudent to ask his old friend, Jay Farr, sitting at the lakeside watching those circling ospreys, for his objective analysis of Pre the athlete. He’s too close – even now – to Pre the person. He’d rather recall the fun side; his horsing around in the locker room, snapping towels, as everyone else struggled to recover. ‘He had that extra amount of energy,’ says Farr. ‘He was just one of those people who was on all the time.’
All these years later, Farr feels pride at his proximity to Coos Bay’s most famous son and is keen to set the record straight about certain facets of the man behind the myth. ‘He was portrayed by a lot of people as being arrogant and I guess you’ve got to be... but, I think that it was just a self-confidence thing. If you ever went to a meet, like when he was a star at the University of Oregon or the Olympic trials, he would stand and sign signatures for little kids until they were tired of him. He had a small-town attitude about people.’
Farr is convinced his old buddy would have won ‘at least one, maybe two Olympic medals’, but discussion of this prompts some darker emotions. ‘I look back with a certain amount of anger,’ he says. ‘Either his seatbelt failed or he didn’t bother to snap it in place when he took off in his MGB, dropping Frank [Shorter] off at Moore’s [Sports Illustrated writer Kenny Moore] house in the hills around Eugene. I was a student at Stanford at the time. I remember feeling just awful. What a waste. What a disappointment to have him disappear like that.’
Half a century on, it’s like Farr has still not fully reconciled himself to the events of that night in May 1975. And he’s not alone. At least he can find solace in running, something he’s resumed in earnest after getting those knees fixed. This year’s aim? To ‘run my age for 10K’. Which means 74 minutes.
It’s a nice thought to think of his old pal, Pre, battling the advancing years in similarly defiant fashion. Only try as I might, I can’t picture it. That lustrous long hair and moustache streaked with grey; the stocky, barrel-chested frame diminished; the gracious fielding of ‘didn’t you used to be?’ approaches.
He’s simply too young, too vital – and will always remain as such. ‘Yes, Pre was super-talented, but his personality, his persona – this was what elevated him above other perhaps equally talented athletes,’ concludes Carney. ‘He had this rock star quality and his untimely death feeds into that.
‘It makes me think of that Neil Young lyric [from lsquo;I run not to add days to my life, but to add life to my days.&rsquo]: it’s better to burn out than fade away. Pre didn’t have the opportunity to slowly fade into time and be forgotten. He will forever be enshrined.’
The wit and wisdom of Pre
‘Success isn’t how far you got, but the distance you travelled from where you started.’
‘The best pace is a suicide pace and today is a good day to die.’
‘To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.’
‘A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways as they’re capable of understanding.’
‘Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.’
‘A lot of people run a race to see who is the fastest. I run to see who has the most guts.’
‘Some people create with words, or with music, or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run.’
‘I run not to add days to my life, but to add life to my days.’
Pre in numbers
24
The age at which he died.
0.64
The margin in seconds by which he missed out on Olympic bronze in 1972.
7
Inside Faith Kipyegon’s 4-Minute Mile Attempt.
5,000
The annual contract value, in dollars, he signed with Nike in 1974.
7
The number of NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) titles that he won.
13:21.87
Health & Injuries.
78
Best wireless headphones.
19
lsquo;It makes me think of that Neil Young lyric from Sports Illustrated cover star.
60.3
Summer running gear sale.
163,000
The amount in dollars that a pair of Pre’s Nike Oregon Waffle running shoes sold for at Sotheby’s in 2022.
