Prefontaine died in a car accident hours after running his last race at Hayward Field.
My own chronic injury owes to a misspent youth trying to be the next Steve Prefontaine.
Pre, as Prefontaine was known to fans, was charismatic and brash, predicting wins and sometimes taunting opponents.
This is where the movie stumbles, although not to a degree that lessens the impact of Prefontaine's willful spirit.
There are eerie similarities between Rupp and Prefontaine: Both were born and reared in Oregon, trained at the University of Oregon and later ran for the Oregon Track Club.
At the 1972 Games in Munich, Prefontaine promised that if it came down to "a pure guts race at the end, " he was the only one who could win.
He has since worked hard to repair his past and was the defending champion at the Prefontaine, winning last year in 9.9 in a tuneup for the U.S. Olympic trials.
The final image, a lap-dissolve in which Prefontaine and Bowerman appear in the frame together, suggests that Towne was shooting for something that never really made it to the screen.
Unseen, though, was another opponent: Prefontaine, whose presence decades after his death on May 30, 1975, at the age of 24, has loomed large over long distance running in the United States.
Rupp put together a remarkable effort earlier this month at the Prefontaine Classic, where he ran the 5, 000 meters in 12:58.9 to finish third behind Great Britain's Mo Farah and Kenya's Isiah Kiplangat Koech.
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Sutherland's voiceover at the beginning of the film strongly implies that what we're about to watch is a battle of wills, but Towne is too respectful of Prefontaine's focus to take that very far.
Though Nike is well known for its ties to basketball and running because of its links to such sports icons as Michael Jordan and the late track star Steve Prefontaine, it also has years of experience creating products for football players.
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And this time of year, the weather is quite outstanding, actually, and we're all looking forward to go there and run on Prefontaine's trail during the day, perhaps visit the site where he unfortunately died, and then go to just a track meet in the evening, which I'm quite confident will be the greatest track meet ever held on American soil, bar the Olympics, I guess.
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