Thorpe’s biographers have noted that this practice was standard enough to have become institutional custom.

The athletes who used aliases were doing so precisely because they understood that playing under their own names would expose them to what Thorpe faced.

Thorpe, by multiple accounts, simply did not know this.

Whether the people who knew about Thorpe’s baseball playing — and some people at Carlisle and in the AAU apparently did know, before the Olympics — chose not to raise the issue because they believed it was not serious, or because they did not want to lose their best athlete, or because they assumed the time limit on protests would protect him if it ever came out, is not entirely clear from the surviving record.

The AAU letter to the IOC acknowledged that those who knew and stayed silent “are deserving of still greater censure for their silence.”