Touched Us All

The night before the 1998 Nebraska State Cross Country Championship, the biggest race of my life to that point, I loaded up on my mom’s spaghetti and watched the biopic Prefontaine, which had come out a year earlier. Starring Jared Leto as the American distance runner Steve Prefontaine, the film is good if not great, and I’d been captivated by its depiction of the 1972 Olympic final in the 5,000 metres.

Having dominated American distance running while representing the University of Oregon, Pre was “a sort of athletic Beatle,” as the BBC’s David Coleman put it. However famous, he was an underdog going into Munich; his competitors knew that he wasn’t battle tested on the global stage. Among them was Finland’s Lasse Virén, who had set the world record in the Olympic 10,000 metres the week before, even after falling in the twelfth lap. Only by running on pure guts could Pre beat Virén and win gold. “This boy’s got utter belief in himself,” Coleman said after he...