‘Steve Prefontaine had nothing to do with the design of the Pre Montreal. Repeating the truth, Steve had no input to the design of the shoe.’
The Myth As Recalled By Noe De Leon
In the photo Pre is wearing his Nike ” Pre Montreal ” racing spikes. The spikes are the 1974 model, the racing spikes were first made for Pre in 1973. Pre had requested Nike made him better spikes, so Nike made him the ” Pre Montreal. ” Then he asked Nike if the racing spikes could be made better for him by removing the woven string toe box at the top of the shoes & making his racing spikes one piece toe box. Nike delivered the improved Nike ” Pre Montreal ” 1974 model, those are the racing spikes Pre is wearing in the photo from 1974. They are colored in The American colors of Red , White & Blue, Pre also raced in ” Pre Montreal ” spikes that were colored in The University Of Oregon colors of Green & Yellow in other competitions. The shoes were also made for Pre & named after Pre in hopes that Pre would race in The 1976 Montreal Olympic 5000m & maybe also The 10,000m.
I was not there, but I know someone who was. Sent him a copy of my column. https://www.jackdogwelch.com/?p=62780 With the following note: Please take a look at “It’s gotta be the shoes.” I quote Coach De Leon verbatim. But I can’t help wondering how accurate his portrayal.
The Truth As Recalled By A Retired Nike Employee
The “Pre Montreal” was first presented in September, 1972, on a blackboard, to a group of Japanese designers, though in fact I had no idea if they were “designers” or who they were. They seemed to understand shoes, and they were gathered together to make the first NIKE track spikes for us (not just the Pre-Montreal), but other shoes for basketball and tennis, as well. The idea for the Pre-Montreal was conceived–though ‘stolen’ is a better word–some months before. adidas was making an entry-level track spike that involved stitching together multiple pieces of scrap leather used in their better shoes.
I believe it is possible that Pre had asked NIKE for a “better” spiked shoe, but in fact there were no NIKE spiked shoes at all in September, 1972. In any case, I had not spoken to Pre about designing shoes for him then, or ever, actually. By the Spring of 1973, Bill Bowerman was making hand-made shoes in Eugene for Pre to wear, and in April, 1973, Pre ran 3:55 for a mile in Eugene in a pair of Bowerman-made shoes, green with a yellow swoosh, at the time the third-fastest mile by an American, as I recall.
Steve Prefontaine had nothing to do with the design of the Pre Montreal. The idea was to make an elite level shoe from the adidas idea of piecing together a shoe from scrap…only we would use better materials. The toebox would be of the finest (also most expensive) light, soft, strong leather we could find, but since we only used a small piece for the toebox, the cost would be reasonable. Moreover the toebox would be ONE PIECE, a pocket for the toes, rather than a seamed toebox of two pieces of leather which described every spiked shoe previously made by any brand, as far as I knew. The adidas “Tokyo 64,” for example was made with at least two pieces of suede leather (to get more yield out of a piece of fine leather) seamed at the heel at toe, with suede overlays covering the seams. The seam inside the toe box presented a potential blister problem for adidas, though I don’t think it ever was.
In any case, the one-piece toe box on the Pre-Montreal would present no blister potential and it would maximize the ability of the toe”pocket” to stretch and mold to any individual athlete’s forefoot. Just before reaching the midfoot, the upper material would switch from expensive suede leather to a wonderfully inexpensive nylon tricot/foam/nylon taffeta sandwich. The thought was to dramatize the switch of materials by an abrupt color change, blue suede up front, red nylon in the back.
The name “Pre Montreal,” I would claim, had nothing to do with Steve Prefontaine, in case the AAU rules enforcers came around. The name referred only to “before Montreal,” and it became available to the public in the Spring of 1973, three years prior to the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Of course, I was not ignorant of the fact that people would associate Steve with the shoe, but I thought we could slip it by without Pre getting in trouble and the marketplace assuming an endorsement of some kind.
Repeating the truth, Steve had no input to the design of the shoe. It was not lasted to fit Pre’s foot, and I don’t recall anyone at NIKE ever taking measurements of Pre’s foot. Bill Bowerman would have, certainly, but all of the shoes that Bill made for Pre in Eugene were hand-lasted, the upper pulled to the last by Bill’s fingers, which would result in a slightly different fit every time. Production shoes are “machine lasted,” the uppers pulled tight to the last by firm and uniform force, every shoe fitting the same as the one before. I am pretty sure that Bill did not have machine capability in his Eugene workshop.
Mr. Noe describes a “woven string toebox” that Pre asked NIKE to remove. There never was such a thing associated with the Pre Montreal. The toebox was always fine blue suede, except for a limited run of Pre-Montreals made in U. of Oregon colors, where the toebox was green suede. Mr. Noe may be confusing the Pre Montreal with later shoes like the “Challenger,” for example, a racing flat with a nylon mesh toebox and the usual nylon tricot/foam/taffeta in the rearfoot, but that shoe came out in 1977, and Pre was gone by then.
Prior to Pre’s death in 1975, I don’t think NIKE made a shoe like the one Mr. Noe describes, so the story about Pre asking us to change the toebox cannot be true. (I was on the East Coast in April, 1974, thirteen-and-a-half-months before Pre’s passing. Such a shoe could conceivably have been produced during that period, and I would not have known about it. But I don’t think so.)
In any case, the Pre-Montreal was not, in my opinion, a very good shoe. It had minimal cushioning between the upper and the spike plate, and I cringe at the thought of Pre running a 10,000 in it, which he did. His final race was a 10,000 in Eugene in a pair of Pre-Montreals. Francie Larrieu set a world indoor mile racord in the shoe in Seattle, 1974, but I still wasn’t happy with the shoe. There were many other shoes we were speccing in that September, 1972, trip to Japan, and I was distracted, and too smug about the upper design to ask myself if the shoe was actually any good.
Honest, I am just glad that Noe De Leon passed away before he had to be subjected to this kind of myth-busting veracity. Noe and I, we like our myths.
New True Myth From Same Old Guy
That is all I can tell you about the Pre Montreal. Except to add a fun story. In that September, 1972, meeting I would present the concept for each model to the roundtable of “designers.” My words went through a translator, and I would have no idea what the translator was telling them. Then the “designers,” about a dozen of them, would lean across the table and buzz at each other like a hive of bees for a minute or two, then snap back in their seats, turn to look at me, and give me one vigorous nod in unison, the signal for me to move on to the next shoe.
Had anything happened? Did anyone understand what I was asking them to do? The next morning, we would resume our meetings, and there the shoes would be on the table, finished, like magic, just as imagined, OMG Perfect, exactly as specced, first try. In one day! (More like 20 hours.)
Those guys were REALLY good.
Conclusion
On November 13, 2025, Nike reopened its landmark store in downtown Portland, Oregon. Among numerous archival displays, there is this:
