The question was whether those modest payments — paid for baseball, not for track and field or anything related to the Olympic events — had corrupted a performance that was manifestly the result of something else entirely.

The 1912 Olympic rules did not require a showing that the prior professional activity had produced an advantage in the specific events at issue.

They required only that the athlete had received payment for athletic performance of any kind.

The rule was categorical, and its application to Thorpe was categorical.

But the categorical nature of the rule does not obscure what the rule actually accomplished in this case: the removal from the record of one of the most dominant performances in the history of multi-event athletics, based on minor payments for a different sport, made two years before the competition, filed past the deadline established for such complaints, by an institution that had tolerated the same practice in other athletes as long as they used false names.

The Decade Between The Two Campaigns