Steve Prefontaine: From Rebel with a Cause to Hero with a Swoosh

Abstract

World-class runner Steve Prefontaine died May 30, 1975, at the age of 24. Running during a time of unparalleled track and field popularity, he was a favorite media focus. Incredibly, he regained media attention in the 1990s. Using a critical cultural studies approach, this article explores media accounts of Prefontaine. A 1970s working-class “rebel with a cause,” Prefontaine served as an ideal of White working-class masculinity and as a voice calling for structural changes to the track and field governing body. In the 1990s, with the Nike funded reemergence of Prefontaine, that rebelliousness was recontextualized and co-opted, shifting Prefontaine into a commodified maverick celebrity, embodying the changing ideals of White, classless masculinity and supporting the ideology of individualism in late consumer capitalism.

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