The disparity between how carefully the rules protected athletes who knew about them — who used aliases precisely because they understood the consequences — and how thoroughly they exposed an athlete who did not know about them is not the same as documented discrimination in the application of the rules.

But it reflects a structural reality: the rules were designed by and for people who had been taught to navigate them, and the athlete who bore the full cost of their enforcement was someone who had been deliberately excluded from the circles where that knowledge was transmitted.

The AAU was, in 1913, an organization with specific cultural assumptions about who athletes were and how they operated.

Thorpe, as a Native American man who had come through a boarding school system and who played minor league baseball under his own name because he did not know he should do otherwise, fell outside those assumptions in ways that cost him everything the Games had given him.