by Tom Jordan
“‘Hi John: Next time, leave the predictions to experts, you ignorant ass. Steve Prefontaine.’
“I laughed for a week.”
Typically, Pre came back tougher than before. The next week, he raced at his distance again, a two-mile against John Ngeno at the San Diego indoor. He continued to be bothered by minor physical problems but got a mental boost by reading that he had been voted the most popular track athlete by the readers of Track & Field News. As he sat reading the story on the bus taking him from the hotel to the indoor arena, he expressed genuine surprise that he was so loved. Maybe in Oregon, he said, but not all over the United States.
After a perfunctory warm-up, Pre came to the line, and only there did his lethargy leave him. He took off at the gun, and through a mile in 4:11.0, was still on his own American-record pace. The Kenyan was tucked in behind, looking fresh. With only a quarter to go, Ngeno spurted into the lead, and Pre held a visible debate with himself before dropping in behind. He waited until there was just one lap to go before unleashing perhaps the fastest last 160 yards he ever ran in an indoor race. His time was 8:24.4, not a record, but satisfying nonetheless.
“I really misjudged myself,” he explained. “I could have run the last 600 yards at that pace. I felt very, very strong the last 300—very powerful, like my old self. I wanted to make my last race of the indoor season a good one, and that’s what I did.”
Mountain Training
To be “better prepared,” in Frank Shorter’s words, than the other runners in that 99th percentile, Pre accepted Frank’s invitation in April to come to Denver and experiment with high-altitude training. Both athletes felt that this was the only alternative to less ethical means of enhancing performance, such as “blood doping.” This process involves the extraction of an athlete’s own blood during the training period, then its reinfusion at a specified time before targeted races, thus boosting the athlete’s oxygen-carrying capacity. Shorter and Pre knew that with a lot of hard work, high-altitude training could accomplish the same result, as the Kenyans were later to prove. “You could look to see what the Scandinavians were doing and make that choice,” Shorter recalls, “or look to see what the Kenyans were doing, and make that choice. It was pretty cut-and-dried.”
Pre drove his van to Denver, then he and Frank went to Taos, New Mexico, for a week of training between 9,000 and 10,000 feet. “This was up and down a road in a ski valley, never really on a flat, and we were probably doing 15 to 16 miles a day up there,” Shorter recalls. To relax, Steve tried downhill skiing, and he gradually got so he could turn both ways. “He sort of learned by force of will,” Shorter chuckles. Mostly, however, they trained hard. “You’re running, eating, sleeping, watching television, going to movies. That was about it. So did we socialize? Yeah, as much as you can when you’re not sleeping!”
Over the three weeks they trained together, Pre was able to put the last vestiges of his distrust of Shorter to rest. From feelings “bordering almost on hate,” as one friend put it, after Shorter beat him in the 1970 AAU three-mile, Pre was able to view his rival as friend. He could even write that Frank was “leaving me in the dust” on their runs at 9,200 feet. Shorter remembers one run in particular.
“We were running down this road from about 9,000 feet, and the wind was blowing up the hill so hard that you actually had to make an effort to run down the hill. It was 32 degrees, and blowing “corn snow,” which is an interesting kind of snow where it has melted and then frozen again. And this pelting corn snow was hitting us and what happens is, as it hits you, it melts. So we were running down this road with this wind blowing up in our faces and I’ve got Pre all dressed up in ski goggles, mittens, and stuff.
“And Steve was a chronic complainer anyway. He complained under the best of conditions. He was really off on a jag: What am I doing here, what is this crap? Finally, I turned to him and said, ‘Steve, you know, nobody in the world is training harder than we are right now.’ It was the only time I ever ran with him that he shut up. For the rest of the run, he didn’t say a word, not a word.”
Only a friend and runner Pre respected could have gotten away with that.
Bringing Europe to Oregon
In the next months, the project that consumed Pre’s time and energy was a tour by a team of Finnish athletes. For five years, Steve had gone to Europe each summer and seen how even small towns in Scandinavia could put on international track meets, attracting the world’s top stars. He thought something similar could be started in Oregon and the Northwest, though not on the scale of the European tour. After extensive dealings with the AAU, he succeeded in arranging a five-meet tour for a small group of Finns, notably Lasse Viren.
This was what Prefontaine and his fans had been waiting for—a race against top competition in Oregon in May. Pre started to whip himself into shape. At the Oregon Twilight meet in April, he turned out for his second 10,000, this one in windy, strength-sapping weather.
“I’m sure not going to bust my ass in this crappy weather,” he said bluntly before the race. He then went out and ran 28:09.4, a world-class time.
“I’m strong and my fitness is coming along at a very fast pace,” a pleased Pre said after his victory laps. “I’m extremely happy with my conditioning.”
Days after that race, it was announced that Viren would not be coming after all because of an injury that precluded him from racing until summer.
“Losing him makes everything I’ve done worthless,” Pre said, with a trace of bitterness. “He was going to justify all the work. But I understand. There were meets in Europe when I didn’t show up to run against him.”
Despite this major disappointment, Pre continued to work hard on making the arrangements. The responsibility was a heavy one, and it added to the maturing effect on Steve, as his friend Geoff Hollister wryly remembers.
“He could now sit still for 60 seconds instead of 30, and he started packing a briefcase as his tool for organization. It looked pretty good, too, until he opened it. He started making lists and organized his days better. He had so many irons in the fire, how he kept track of things is beyond me.
“Steve really needed help with the Finnish tour. The AAU had him so messed up with their belated approval that many details had been overlooked. I looked over his list and asked, ‘How are you going to pick them up at the airport?’
“‘I don’t know.’
“‘Well, how many pole vault poles do you think Antti Kalliomaki has? You going to show up in your MG?’
“‘Damn it, then you do it!’
“For Steve, that was progress—a year earlier, the Finns would have been greeted by a smile and two seats. He was learning to delegate.”
Without Viren, Pre had no one to run against. The hassles of the tour had occupied his mental energies, but now he was finally able to think about going for some records.
The second meet on the itinerary was in his hometown of Coos Bay; the race was 2000 meters. Despite the chilly evening, a crowd of 4,000 showed up in Pirate Stadium to see their native son. Oregon teammate Dave Taylor was there.
“Pre came up to us two hours before the race and asked if anyone knew what the American record for 2000 meters was, as if he didn’t know. And he says he thinks he’ll try for the American record. I seriously thought he was joking, because this had to be one of the most low-key meets I’ve ever been to in my life.”
Lars Kaupang led the first two laps in 2:02.0 before Prefontaine took over and pushed through two more 60-second laps. He finished with a 59.4 for a new American record of 5:01.4.
“He said he would do it and he did it,” Taylor marvels. “I mean, he’s on the track in Coos Bay at 10 o’clock one night with 200 loggers in the stands, and he does it.”
For the next 30 minutes, Pre signed programs for the hundreds of Coos Bay kids who had chanted “Go Pre! Go Pre!” every time their hero passed by the Pirate grandstands. They continued to cluster around him as he did his warmdown, like puppies after mother’s milk. Perha
ps it was here, in Coos Bay, at home, where one saw the full impact that Pre the Legend had upon the young people of Oregon.
Speaking Out
Even while he was making news on the track, Pre was making more news off of it. He had been embarrassed and chagrined when the wire services had taken a quote of his out of context in a story about the inadequacies of the American amateur system. Every four years, Pre had said, the United States expected its athletes to win medals at the Olympic Games but then forgot about them for the three years in between.
“People say I should be running for a gold medal, for the old red, white, and blue and all that bull,” he had said in April. “But it’s not going to be that way. I’m the one who has made all the sacrifices. Those are my American records, not my country’s.” This became known as his “To hell with love of country” speech, and while Pre regretted being thought of as unpatriotic, he didn’t take back his words. He didn’t live his life based on opinion polls.
That furor slowly quieted, but Pre was never one to back down from conflict. He had always had the strength of his convictions, and combined with his bluntness was an awareness that he had a special role to play in how the sport was perceived and how it was administered.
Now the AAU was imposing a moratorium on competition by athletes a certain number of days before and after its own international dual meets. The goal was to force the athletes to pass up the important European invitationals and instead compete on the AAU tour. Pre’s decision to skip the 1974 AAU Championships, and the international meets held subsequently, had produced a punitive response from an organization not used to being ignored. Pre was fed up.
“If they don’t let me go and run where I want this summer,” Pre threatened, “then I just may not compete in the AAU event here [in Eugene].” The subject of the AAU reminded Steve of his biggest gripe.
“I’ve got bills to pay,” he explained to George Pasero of the Oregon Journal. “I’m just like any other American. If I don’t pay my electric bill, they turn off my lights. After college, our athletes are turned out to pasture. We have no Olympic program in this country. It’s as simple as that. No sports medicine, no camps, no nothing. I’m not talking about subsidizing us. I’m just talking about a national plan. I want to see some interest from somebody. In the past, we’ve sat back and let our natural talent do it. Well, the rest of the world has caught up.”
“I’m really not trying to get under anybody’s skin,” Pre had said at another time in a less strident tone. “I’m just trying to bring the problems to a head and an understanding. To make the people of this country realize what’s happening is that the amateurs do not have the same benefits as, say, the Europeans. And I’d just like to bring this to the acknowledgment of the public.”
As the last race on the tour approached, a 5000 meters—in Eugene, of course—Pre was justifiably proud of the tour he had organized. Despite the AAU and Viren’s pullout, the meets had been a success.
“Nobody believed I could pull it off,” Pre said to Leo Davis of The Oregonian during the last week in May. “I couldn’t have done it without help, but from the beginning, it has been my responsibility. I carried the load. I like what has happened. I just couldn’t afford to do it again the same way.
“I’m in for quite a bit. With luck I get back the expenses, but I can’t get anything for the hours of work. As an amateur, I’ve gotten used to working without pay. If I had been paid 50 cents an hour for every workout and every race, I’d be rich enough to sponsor tours.”
One of these days, Davis observed, “an athlete, maybe Pre, will strike the spark that unites track and field and brings the AAU to its creaky knees. United, athletes have that much clout; without them there is no AAU.”
“It’s time for a change,” concluded the column, which appeared on May 27. “Even Pre can’t run forever.”
Steve, relaxed and happy, chatted with friend Frank Shorter before the start of his last race on May 29, 1975. GEOFF PARKS
The Last Race
Pre had hoped that the 5000 on May 29 would be the climactic race in a duel between himself and Lasse Viren. With Viren out, Pre called upon Frank Shorter to step down to the 5-K distance for this meet. Shorter, who had been visiting and training in Eugene, willingly agreed.
The race itself was not a typical Prefontaine race. He followed Frank through an 8:40.5 two-mile, and led only laps 5 and 6. Then, with three laps to go, he accelerated to 63-second pace. The 7,000 spectators in the stands reacted vocally, almost with relief that Pre still had that spark at Eugene, that winning streak at Hayward Field. He finished with a 60.3 last lap and a winning time of 13:23.8, just l.9 seconds off his own American record, in his first serious 5000 of 1975. His winning string at distances over a mile in Eugene was extended to 25 straight. He never lost.
“I’m ahead of what I’ve been in the past when it comes to strength, but not fitness,” Steve assessed after his warm-down jog. “I need one fast race. I always run better after a good mile, and I think I’m capable of one next week. If I get a good mile, I should have a good summer.”
With three laps to go in his last 5000, Pre forced the pace against Shorter. ERIK HILL
Moments before the last victory lap in front of his fans. ERIK HILL
Final Lap. ERIK HILL
11
Final Lap
Against the unbearableness that was felt at the time of Steve Prefontaine’s death, it was comforting to know that virtually everyone he cared about was close to him on the last night of his life.
His last race over, Pre took several victory laps, saying thanks to the people of Eugene. At one point, he stopped and talked with his family who had come from Coos Bay to watch the meet. After signing autographs, he went to the apartment of his friend Mark Feig to shower.
Later, Pre stopped by the University of Oregon track-and-field awards banquet and talked to Bill Dellinger about his training. After a brief visit, he and his girlfriend, Nancy Alleman, left for the Paddock Tavern where he socialized and had several glasses of beer. After about an hour, they left for the party being held at Geoff Hollister’s house to celebrate the end of the Finnish tour and arrived about 10:00 p.m.
Shorter, Kenny Moore, and the Finns were there. Pre’s parents, Ray and Elfriede, were also there, as was high school coach Walt McClure. Pre was happy and relieved that the tour was over. According to the guests in attendance, he drank about four or five beers in the two hours he remained at the party. Pre spent his time there visiting with family and friends. He didn’t appear drunk to those present.
At 12:15 a.m., Pre left with Nancy and Frank. “We all three got into the MG and drove down to the University of Oregon ticket office where Nancy had left her car and let her off,” Shorter told Jerry Uhrhammer of Eugene’s The Register-Guard. “Then he drove me home.”
Shorter was staying with Kenny Moore at his home on one of the hills encircling Eugene. He and Pre sat in the car for a few minutes, discussing what their stand would be on the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) moratorium. Both agreed that they would not duck the championship meet but would run their specialties all out and then take on the AAU. With that, Shorter got out of the car, and Pre drove down the hill.
The Accident
What exactly happened at the bottom of Skyline Boulevard is open to question. It was a road Pre had run along dozens of times in his years in Eugene. As it approaches its intersection with Birch Lane, there is a sharp curve. Although there was no indication of excessive speed, Pre’s 1973 MGB crossed the center line, went over the curb, and hit one wall of the natural rock that lines either side of the street. His car flipped over, pinning him underneath. The MGB was equipped with a roll bar, but Pre was not wearing his seat belt at the time of the accident.
The house closest to the accident was owned by the Alvarado family. Bill and Karen Alvarado had gone to the track meet, then visited friends, before returning home shortly after midnight. They made sandwiches and sat with the windows open on the stuffy
night. The Alvarados recalled what happened next in a 1985 article by Cathy Henkel of The Register-Guard.
As they ate and talked, their ears perked at the loud intruding engine of a sports car on the road just below their bedroom windows. Then they heard the screech of tires, the “thunk” of impact, and silence. “Absolute, dead silence,” she remembered. “It was so absolutely still that we knew something was wrong.”
Bill Alvarado decided to see what had happened. Within seconds, he was out the door and on the narrow, wooded road. He saw nothing at first, then heard a car starting around the curve and was momentarily blinded when its headlights flashed into his eyes.
“I thought he’d hit the stop sign,” Alvarado recalled. “I stood right in the street and waved my arms. But there was no way he was going to stop and I had to get out of the way in a hurry.” Alvarado jumped aside as a light-colored MGB raced by him. Angry, he hopped into his Jeep and tried to follow, but the car quickly vanished around the turn. Alvarado looped around Hendricks Park, and when he turned off Birch and onto Skyline, he saw the wreck of another MGB. He parked, yelled to his wife that someone was hurt and to call for help while he returned to the overturned car. Ten years later in retelling the story, he is still chilled when he remembers what happened next.
“I didn’t know who it was, but he was still gasping and somehow I managed to lift the car part of the way off him. But that’s all I could do. I couldn’t get the car completely off and I couldn’t pull him out.
“I’m not a medical person but I know he was still breathing. If I could have had help lifting the car, if that other car had stopped, we could have saved time and maybe together we could have lifted it off him.”