Back to the original photo. As someone else has pointed out, the athletes in the photo participated in a now-famous VO2max study at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas. There was a six-mile track race at the end. Gary Tuttle won. Shorter finished second. Prefontaine ran two miles in about 8:50 and then dropped out. But that was what he had planned to do all along, since this was January and he had upcoming indoor meet commitments. Apparently not all the other athletes knew that Pre was going to just run eight laps. One of them, Philip Ndoo (who died a couple of years ago), tried to run with Pre for the first couple of laps. Maybe he would have finished slightly higher had he known that Pre was just running a time trial/workout.