The Front Runner
The Life of Steve Prefontaine
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4.6 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Sports journalism at its finest, a book so well-researched that everyone who thinks they know Pre is in for a big surprise.” —Christopher McDougall, bestselling author of Born to Run
On the 50th anniversary of American Track and Field icon Steve Prefontaine’s tragic death comes an essential reappraisal of his life and legacy, a powerful work of narrative history exploring the forces and psychology that made Prefontaine great and separating the man from the myths.
In the fifty years since his tragic death in a car crash, Steve Prefontaine has towered over American distance running. One of the most recognizable and charismatic figures to ever run competitively in the United States, Prefontaine has endured as a source of inspiration and fascination—a talent who presaged the American running boom of the late 1970s and helped put Nike on the map as the brand’s first celebrity-athlete face.
Now on the anniversary of his untimely death, author Brendan O’Meara, host of the Creative Nonfiction podcast, offers a fresh, definitive retelling of Prefontaine’s life, revisiting one of the most enigmatic figures in American sports with a twenty-first-century lens. Through over a hundred and fifty original interviews with family, friends, teammates, and competitors, this long-overdue reappraisal of Prefontaine—the first such exhaustive treatment in almost thirty years—provides never-before-told stories about the unique talent, innovative mental strength, and personal struggles that shaped Prefontaine on and off the track. Bringing new depth to an athlete long eclipsed by his brash, aggressive running style and the heartbreak of his death at twenty-four, O’Meara finds the man inside the myth, scrutinizing a legacy that has shaped American sports culture for decades.
What emerges is a singular portrait of a distinctly American talent, a story written in the pines and firs of the Pacific Northwest back when running was more blue-collar love than corporate pursuit—the story of a runner whose short life casts a long, fast shadow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this elegant biography, Creative Nonfiction podcaster O'Meara (Six Weeks in Saratoga) chronicles the brief life of middle-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, who was 24 years old when he died in a car accident in 1975. Offering keen insight into the athlete's formative years, O'Meara speculates that Prefontaine's steely resolve stemmed in part from the frequent beatings he endured at the hands of his father, during which he was expected to swallow his whimpers to demonstrate toughness. After an impressive high school cross-country career, he enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he notched a string of championships that landed him on the cover of Sports Illustrated when he was only a freshman. The vivid recreations of key races highlight the combination of strategy and pure athleticism that powered Prefontaine's success, as when O'Meara details how Prefontaine used his remarkable endurance to his advantage during a 5,000-meter Olympic trial race by gradually increasing his pace as his competitors began to flag during the final laps. (He set an American record for the event that day but went on to underperform in the 1972 Munich Olympics.) O'Meara's loving portrait also celebrates Prefontaine's legacy off the field, most notably his campaign against the Amateur Athletic Union's rules disqualifying athletes who attempted to monetize their success. Nimble and comprehensive, this is a stirring tribute to a generational runner gone too soon.
