The athlete who had beaten everyone else by hundreds of points was officially the equal of the man he had defeated.

His scores — the world record performance in the decathlon — were not in the standard results.

The record that stood until 1948 was not in the books where it belonged.

This was not a technicality.

It was a substantial and visible gap between what the 1982 reinstatement had declared — that Thorpe was an Olympic champion — and what the official historical record showed.

For Anita DeFrantz, a former Olympic rower and one of the highest-ranking Americans in the IOC, this was the unfinished business.