He had lived long enough to be voted the greatest athlete of the first half of the century; he had not lived long enough to see even the partial reinstatement of 1982.

His daughter Grace, who did the most sustained work of any of his children to secure that recognition, died in 2008, fourteen years before the full reinstatement was achieved.

The record now says what it should have said since July 1912: that James Francis Thorpe, Wa-Tho-Huk, Sac and Fox Nation, won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Stockholm Olympics.

It took a hundred and ten years to get there.