It was faster than any decathlete would run until 1972.

These are not marginal performances.

They are not the performances of someone who happened to be better than a thin field on a particular day.

They are the performances of someone who appears, by the evidence, to have had athletic gifts that were genuinely exceptional in the specific combination that multi-event competition demands.

The argument that the disqualification was a procedural absurdity is strengthened, rather than weakened, when you consider the scale of what was being removed from the record.

The question was not whether Thorpe had received a trivial advantage by playing minor league baseball for a few months two years before the Olympics.