Some say his toughness and grit and absolute refusal to quit came from her.
"Anyone who knew Elfriede knew how strong-willed she was — and stubborn," Prefontaine Classic meet director Tom Jordan said Wednesday. "Even though she was always soft-spoken and very self-effacing, she had a toughness that Steve had also."
Elfriede Prefontaine, the mother of the late Steve Prefontaine, an Oregon icon and the man considered by many to be the greatest distance running legend in American track and field history, died Tuesday at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield, 12 days after suffering a fall at a Eugene assisted living facility. She was 88.
The diminutive woman with a German accent, who stood perhaps 5-foot-1 in her prime, was born in a small village outside Berlin on March 4, 1925, said her daughter, Linda Prefontaine of Eugene.
Elfriede Prefontaine’s only son was 24 when he was killed in a single-car crash near Eugene’s Hendricks Park on May 30, 1975, just hours after winning his 5,000-meters race at Hayward Field. She was only 50 when she lost him.
“It was absolutely devastating,” Linda Prefontaine, 59, recalled Wednesday, her voice cracking over a phone line. “You see him running one night, and then?…?”
Her parents were at the same post-meet party that their son, known simply as "Pre," attended that night at the home of fellow trackman Geoff Hollister, Linda Prefontaine said. Then they made the drive home to Coos Bay, where Pre's legend began as a track and cross-country star at Marshfield High School.
The incomprehensible news came the next morning.
“It was crippling to my mother,” Linda Prefontaine said.
How did she cope?
“Gutted it out. She always gutted things out. You just got through it. You powered through it.”
That was her way, her daughter said, the same as it was her son’s way on the track during his brilliant career at the University of Oregon from 1969 to 1973 and during his guttiest race ever, on Sept. 10, 1972, at the Summer Olympics in Munich, in his mother’s native country. With his parents, Elfriede and Ray Prefontaine, watching from the stands, and running against the world’s best in the 5,000 meters, Pre went for the gold with a lap to go. But he had nothing left down the stretch and finished fourth.
Still, Steve Prefontaine brought his mother great joy during his short life, Linda Prefontaine said. He was the hero of an entire state, an entire sport, and only one woman on earth could watch him run and say, “That’s my son.”
“She was extremely proud that this was her son that everyone was making such a big deal about,” Linda Prefontaine said. Yet, Elfriede Prefontaine also would chastise Pre about quotes attributed to him in the newspapers.
“That’s not what I said,” he would tell her. “That’s what those reporters do. They turn things around.”
Less than a month after his death, the first Prefontaine Classic was held at Hayward Field, Jordan recalled Wednesday. Pre’s parents were there. And they were both there the following year, and every year after that, until Ray Prefontaine died in 2004 at age 85, Jordan said.
After her husband died, Elfriede Prefontaine kept attending every year, getting a ride from her home in Coos Bay from Pre’s high school teammate, Bob Huggins.
She kept attending even when she was virtually blind from macular degeneration that struck in the late 1990s, and then from a stroke in 2010 that damaged the visual cortex in the back of her brain, Linda Prefontaine said.
She was too ill to attend this year’s Pre Classic, so she and her daughter watched it on TV from the Eugene assisted living facility where Elfriede was rehabilitating after heart surgery at RiverBend in April.
“We watched,” Linda Prefontaine said. “She listened.”
Pat Tyson, who was Pre’s teammate and roommate at the UO in the early 1970s, said Pre inherited much of his mother’s personality.
“Obviously, he took a lot from his father. But he definitely took that orneriness from her,” said Tyson, now the track and cross-country coach at Gonzaga University in Spokane.
Just like her, Pre was always up early and always had to have everything in order, everything just right.
Pre was a “clean freak, just like his mom,” Tyson said. “Pre liked everything perfect — and there’s no doubt he got that from her.”
Tyson said he also remembers Pre’s mother picking lint off her son’s sport coat.
“I think that drove him a little batty,” Tyson said.
But that fierceness, that determination on the track that so captivated track fans in the early 1970s, and eventually Hollywood producers more than 20 years after his death, those were things Tyson and others saw in that small German woman, too.
Pre could beat anyone at arm wrestling, Tyson said. “I think she could have, too.”
Tyson recalled sitting in a theater in January 1997 and watching “Prefontaine,” the first of two feature films about Pre’s life. A home movie clip at the beginning of the film showed siblings Steve and Linda doing push-ups in their Coos Bay home. And who was in the background doing push-ups, too? Elfriede Prefontaine.
It was her son’s spirit that kept her going during the last 38 years of her life, Tyson said.
“Anybody who loses a son, there’s nothing worse than that,” he said. “But Elfriede continued to live Steve’s life.”
Pre’s parents not only continued to attend meets at Hayward Field, but they would go to indoor track meets in Portland, attend the functions afterward and listen to the stories.
“She loved to be there to honor his spirit,” Tyson said.
In addition to her daughter Linda, Elfriede Prefontaine is survived by a stepdaughter, Neta Prefontaine of Eugene; a sister, Irma Button of Empire; and two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
A memorial service in Coos Bay will be announced later, Linda Prefontaine said.
Elfriede Prefontaine will be buried in the family’s plot at Sunset Memorial Park in Coos Bay, next to her mother, husband and son.
-- The Register Guard