The Native American Who Won Two Olympic Gold Medals – Then Had His Titles Taken Away Before History Finally Reversed The Decision
It is also somewhat clinical, as institutional statements tend to be, when the situation it describes is one in which a man’s athletic achievements were removed from history by an institution that violated its own rules, maintained the removal for decades, offered partial correction that preserved a “sports absurdity” of two co-champions, and required another forty years and a campaign by his grandson’s generation to complete the correction.
Jim Thorpe did not need the IOC to tell him he had won.
“I won ’em, and I know I won ’em,” he had said.
He died knowing that.
The documentation of what he knew took considerably longer.
The score that stands in the record — 8,412 points, July 15, 1912, Stockholm — is the most durable thing he left behind.
It is there now.