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.” He 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 now 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.

But the hand fate dealt Pre was a singularly cruel one. In the early hours of May 30, 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 2,000m to 10,000m. 

The previous evening, in a characteristically exuberant performance in the 5,000m 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 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 Jay. 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.