No Such Thing as Gifted

"To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”  — Steve Prefontaine 

Steve Prefontaine wasn’t gifted. He wasn’t a boy-hero prodigy from some fairytale. Until his junior year in high school, he rode the bench. When he made varsity and actually competed, he finished middle of the pack.  

He didn’t accept that, though. He wanted to be the best. 

So, he started showing up early. Staying late. Running alone. He trained outside of practice. He couldn’t get by on talent. He didn’t have any. But he did have the capacity to endure. We all do. Pre just learned it early.  

By the time he got to The University of Oregon, he didn’t just train hard, he was on a different level.  

Fast forward to Olympic training camp. 

In the darkness of the morning before the sun rose, he was out there pounding out ten miles on the backroads. Or on the dunes. Or on the mountain trails. This morning it's the Canoe trail, and he’s crushing 6-minute miles. And this? This is an easy morning. He still has 90 miles to go this week.  

As he left the trail, a police cruiser pulled up. 

“What are you doing out here this early?” the officer asked. 

“What’s it look like?” Pre said. “I’m training.”

“Ah,” the cop nodded. “Carry on.” 

Pre gave him a look  

Really?  

But kept moving.  

He finished on pace. Good. First training session done. Now? A full day of class. Then to Hayward Field for track practice. 

After training, after classes, he'd clock in at one of his two part-time jobs. Back then, amateur athletes didn’t get paid—they had to carry their own weight. So, on top of a full academic workload, training twice a day, Pre worked two jobs to support himself. He didn’t complain. This is what it took, and he was game.   

In competitive running there' a strategy called the kicker strategy. Most people kick. They save their energy. They let the frontman suffer and try to steal the win at the end. 

Not Pre. Pre was the frontman. You couldn’t kick past Pre because he wasn’t ahead by five or ten feet. More like twenty or thirty. If you were going to beat Pre, you were going to have to bleed to do it. And nobody made him run that way, that’s just who he was.

He didn’t miss meets either. Not for sickness, not for injury. Not once. And we take days off because we “just aren’t feeling it”? Give me a break.  

By 1972, he hadn’t lost a race at a distance over a mile He was smashing records and selling out meets. Track wasn’t niche anymore—it was front-page news. Pre made it that way.  

So, when the ’72 Olympic team was selected, there was no question: Pre was going. He didn’t luck his way in. He dragged himself there, one brutal session at a time. 

September 10, 1972. A sold-out crowd of 80,000 stood with bated breath in Munich Stadium to watch the 5000-meter race. Those that couldn’t get seats gathered atop an old WW2 berm about three hundred yards away from the stadium and tried to get a peak with their binoculars. 

The lineup was stacked. Finnish Legend Lasse Virén — world record holder in the 5000m and 10,000m — Tunisia’s Mohammed Gammoudi, Great Britain’s Ian Stewart, and Emiel Puttemans of Belgium. Then there was 21-year-old Pre, a kid among killers. A rookie surrounded by legends.  

Imagine the pressure he must have felt. Even on his home track, Pre always struggled with pre-race nerves. Something was always off. He didn’t warm up right or he wasn’t loose enough, or his stomach hurt. He almost never wanted to be out there. The starting gun was his boogeyman.  

But he never let his nerves run the show. He shut that shit down. He had work to do, the track doesn’t care about excuses.  

Before the race, his Coach told him to stay with the pack. To kick like the others. 

“Being a front-runner won’t work against these guys,” he warned. 

“That’s not my race,” Pre said. 

And it wasn’t. 

The racers are called to their marks. His Coach gives him a final word. Pre nods, steps up,

and takes his place. 

Ten seconds—his heart’s pounding. 

Five—his stomach’s churning. 

One—terror. 

CRACK. 

The gun fires—Pre explodes forward like a man possessed. Everything vanishes. The crowd. The heat. The fear. Only the race remains. 

But something’s off.  

The pace is slow. Slower than he expected—under nine minutes at the two-mile mark. A kicker’s race. The kind he hated. He ignores the creeping doubt and keeps moving.  

Four laps remaining. His heart is pounding and legs shaking, but he soars to the front. Two laps left. Five runners break away: Virén. Gammoudi. Stewart. Puttemans. Pre. Rounding the curve, Virén surges past Pre as Gammoudi hovers off Pre’s right shoulder.   

The final lap. Pre bites down and goes for it. Gammoudi steps in front and blocks him. 

Bastard he thought. 

Into the last turn—Pre opens to his full stride and tries once more. 

Cut off. Again. 

By the final straightaway, Pre’s body couldn’t keep up with this will, and he staggered to the finish line, getting passed by Ian Stewart. Viren took the gold, Gammoudi took silver, and Stewart took bronze. 21-year-old Pre finished fourth in the world.  

He sat alone after the race, not just gutted—but hollow. Not angry. Not even sad. Just... numb. For the first time, he wondered if it had all been for nothing. The miles. The mornings. The sacrifice.  

It wasn’t supposed to go this way.

One man approached pre. Not a coach. Not a teammate. A reporter—Blaine Newnham, someone who’d covered Pre’s meteoric rise from benchwarmer to Olympian. 

“It was a nice race, Pre. It sucks, but we have to talk.” he said.  

“I've got nothing to say” Pre replied, walking off. 

Blaine caught him by the shoulder.  

“Stop. How old are you?” 

“21.”  

“You took the lead with a mile to go. You ran your ass off and finished fourth in the world. At 21. You think that’s bad?” 

Pre sighed. “Alright. It isn’t that bad.”  

It still crushed him. But at least Newnham’s words gave him some perspective. He didn’t get a medal that day, but he left behind something heavier. Proof. Proof that a skinny kid from Oregon could claw his way to the world’s highest stage on grit alone. No gifts. No shortcuts. Just work.  And he almost took the whole thing.  

When he got home, he went to war with himself. Every morning, that same voice whispered: What’s the point? You’re just going to lose again. We’ve all heard that voice, trying to tempt us into giving up. Sometimes we do. But Pre didn’t. 

No. He thought. 

Someone has to go. If I won’t—who will? 

So, he laced back up and got after it. No cameras. No fans. Just ten miles before sunrise. Again. Business as usual. No shortcuts. No cutting corners.  

While his competition blood-doped, Pre doped on nature. He spent his summers at 9,000 feet. There, he grinded out miles on the mountainside with Olympic marathon champ Frank Shorter. The air held 26% less oxygen than sea level. When he came down, sea level felt like breathing fire.  

Pre ran like the clock owed him money. At the Oregon Twilight meet, he set an American record in the 10k. At another event, he ran a 3:53 mile—at the time, only two Americans had ever gone faster. 

Then the stakes got higher.  

May 29, 1975. 

Pre hosted his own meet at Hayward Field to raise funds for the sport he loved. He stepped onto the track to face Lasse Virén—the same man who kicked past him to get the gold in Munich. 

Three years later, the pain hadn’t faded. At the line, Munich flashes through his mind. The pain. The regret. The fourth place that never stopped hurting. But he doesn’t have pre-race nerves like in Munich. Only a heightened sense of things. A determination to impose his will on his home turf.  

The gun fires and he takes off like a cheetah on the hunt. He hits the track like it owes him something. 4:16 pace. Relentless. Viren stays back and waits for the opportunity to kick. Tries to let Pre do all the work and then pass him at the end.  

Not this time. 

Pre sets the most aggressive pace of his life and keeps a gap between him and Viren. Viren kicks. Pre kicks harder. Three years of pain in every stride. He’s not letting go. Rounding the final curve, Pre opens the gap even further and crosses the finish line at 13:23.8 to Viren’s 13:26.4. 

He did it.  

The stadium erupts with cheers and applause like a volcano. It wasn’t about the time. It was about the cost. They knew what Pre carried, and they watched him claim redemption.  

For the first time since Munich, he felt like the work had paid off. He beat the man who beat him. On his home track. For something that mattered. 

That night, he celebrated with friends. Laughed. Smiled. And then he left the party. Alone. 

Sometime after midnight, he rounded a curve on Skyline Boulevard. His car flipped, hit a rock wall, and landed upside down in a ditch. Pre was ejected and pinned beneath it. 

The man who found him tried to lift the car. For a moment, he held it up—just enough to glimpse Pre, still alive beneath the wreckage. 

But he couldn’t do it alone, so he ran for help. By the time he returned, it was too late. Reports suggest that if someone—anyone—had helped him, they could’ve saved Pre.

But no one came. 

He was only 24.  

No second Olympics. No victory lap. No goodbye.  

Just silence. 

But legends don’t die. They echo. His fight wasn’t over. Not even in death.  

Back then, amateur athletes had nothing. The Amateur Athletic Association had them in a chokehold. No funding. No staff. No teams. They paid for their own flights, uniforms, lodging—even meals. When you weren’t repping your country at the Olympics, your country forgot you existed. 

Pre lost access to every resource the moment he graduated. But he kept training. He kept showing up to amateur meets. And he started speaking out. They flooded his inbox with pro-offers. He turned down every single one of them.  

To accept would’ve meant surrendering to the AAU. That wasn’t his style. He’d rather risk a lifetime ban than betray the right thing.  

It didn’t happen overnight—but the system felt his pressure. 

In 1978, Frank Shorter and other athletes who knew Pre testified before Congress. Moved by what they heard, Congress passed the Amateur Sports Act—a law that finally gave athletes the support they deserved. 

But Pre didn’t need to see the victory—because he’d already made his point. 

He showed the world what kind of guts he had. He won the NCAA Cross Country Championship three times and the NCAA 3-mile all four years in college. He held every American record from 2,000 to 10,000 meters. He was undefeated in distances over a mile, winning 35 of 38 races.  

He didn’t get there because he was talented. He showed up early, he went deep, and he refused to coast. He forged his mind and being through pain and suffering. You want to be like Pre?  

I do.  

So, we have to endure. Cultivate the capacity for suffering. Everyone wants to run from suffering, especially today. Our culture is obsessed with comfort. But comfort kills---It’s the death of ambition and free expression.  

Because if it doesn’t break you a little, it won’t build you at all. Suffering transforms. That’s what Pre learned when he decided the bench wasn’t for him. He didn’t run from pain—he chose it. Invited it. Let it carve him into the frontman the world couldn’t ignore. 

Guts matter. The Gift matters. You don’t need to be born with anything—just give your all. Pre did it, every single time. 

Someone has to go. If I won’t—who will? 

Why not you?