But those around him — his children, his biographers, the Native American community that had watched one of its most celebrated members be stripped of his titles — did not share his equanimity, or at least did not feel that equanimity was the right response to what had happened.

The Amateur Athletic Union restored Thorpe’s amateur status in 1973, two decades after his death.

The restoration was largely symbolic at that point — you cannot restore amateur status to someone who has been dead for twenty years and whose playing career ended in 1928 — but it was a formal acknowledgment that the original decision had been wrong, or at minimum that the category the AAU had punished him for violating no longer made sense.

The restoration of the amateur status did nothing to change the Olympic record.