“I was not very wise in the ways of the world and did not realize this was wrong.”

The letter is difficult to read without feeling the specific cruelty of the situation.

He had competed and won honestly, by any athletic measure.

The payment he had received for playing baseball — a modest sum, in a minor league, two years before the Olympics — had nothing to do with the performance he produced in Stockholm.

And his competitors in the pentathlon and decathlon had done exactly what he had done, by a significant chance, simply under false names.

How The Story Broke — And Why The Timing Mattered