What is also documented is the specific context in which Thorpe navigated these rules.

He was a Sac and Fox citizen who had grown up in Indian Territory, been put through a boarding school system designed to systematically replace Native identity with something else, and who had — by his own account — genuinely not understood the rule he was breaking.

The letter he wrote to the AAU is not the letter of a man who cynically bent the rules and was caught.

It is the letter of someone who did not know the rule existed.