The gentleman amateur, free from the need to earn income from sport, was the ideal that Pierre de Coubertin and the founders of the modern Olympic movement had enshrined in the Games’ structure.

Working-class athletes who needed to earn money from their athletic ability — who could not afford the luxury of competing purely for love — were structurally excluded from this conception of the Olympic ideal.

They could participate only if they found ways to obscure their economic reality, which is precisely what the practice of playing summer baseball under assumed names accomplished for white American college athletes.

Jim Thorpe did not play under an assumed name.