I taught the film twice in a course on the literature and culture of running, so I've had a chance to watch it five times. I like it.
I like the way it dramatizes the moment when he first emerges as a young god, a kind of rock star. It's when he's running that race at Hayward Field, his coach has instructed him NOT to lead from the front, and, feeling trapped, he suddenly bursts to the front and pushes ahead. There's a crunchy rock chord, and, somehow, the film captures the first slight flicker of something--energy? charisma? sex?--coursing through the stands. He's a rock star suddenly finding his audience. I don't know if the film has that as the moment when the "Pre! Pre! Pre!" is invented, but it may be; that happens at some point early on.
There just hasn't been any other runner I can think of who established that sort of rock-star relationship with his audience. He was a phenomenon. You can argue with his world rank; you can't argue with that. The film, of course, knows this, and it's quite self-conscious about massaging the charisma-thing. In the eulogy at the end, either Boweman/Sutherland or somebody else talks about the "it" that Pre had, and how he had "a lot of it," or "more of it than anybody has ever had." The film does a great job, in any case, of making ou feel that "it."
One curiosity of the film is how much time it spend, in the middle portion, falling into a dreamy swoon as it follows the developing love relationship between Pre and his blond girlfriend-whose-name-escapes-me. Mary: that's it. Pre almost acts like a girl--shaking his dirty-blond locks out of HIS eyes and batting his eyelashes. It's a little icky, actually. My hunch is that the filmmakers were hoping for a crossover audience: not just male runners, but a chick-flick audience that, it was hoped, would fall in love with Pre just as Mary was.
It didn't work. The film did poorly at the box office.