Grace Thorpe and her sister Charlotte received the medals.

Charlotte said, at the ceremony, that “the 70-year-old marathon is over.” Grace said she thought her father would have simply said, “It’s about time.”

The ceremony was emotional and widely covered.

To most observers, it looked like the culmination of a long and just campaign — the restoration of a wrong that should never have occurred.

But the IOC had attached something to its 1982 decision that transformed its meaning.

The Smithsonian Magazine, in a 2013 investigation of why the recognition was still incomplete, described it precisely: along with the announcement that Thorpe’s name would be added to the list of Olympic champions for 1912, the IOC had appended a small but decisive qualification.