Stockholm, July 1912<\/p>\n
The crowd at the Olympic stadium in Stockholm had been watching athletics for six days when the decathlon reached its final event on the afternoon of July 15, 1912 \u2014 and the man standing at the starting line of the 1,500-meter run had already made the competition something close to a formality.<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe was twenty-four years old, six feet tall, and built in the specific way that defied athletic categorization \u2014 not a sprinter’s body or a distance runner’s body or a thrower’s body, but something that seemed designed for all of those purposes simultaneously.<\/p>\n
He had just spent three days competing in ten separate disciplines across the decathlon, and he had led after the very first event.<\/p>\n
He had not relinquished that lead.<\/p>\n
When the final whistle blew, Thorpe had set a world record of 8,412 points.<\/p>\n
His nearest competitor, Sweden’s Hugo Wieslander, finished 688 points behind him.<\/p>\n
In a competition designed to test the full range of human athletic capacity \u2014 speed, power, endurance, coordination, technical skill \u2014 the margin between first and second place was enormous by any measure.<\/p>\n
A week earlier, Thorpe had won the pentathlon by finishing first in four of its five events, a performance that had already drawn astonished commentary from sports journalists across Europe and North America.<\/p>\n
Sweden’s King Gustav V met Thorpe at the closing ceremonies and presented him with his trophies.<\/p>\n
What the king said to him has become one of the most quoted lines in the history of athletics.<\/p>\n
The exchange is famous enough that it deserves care: accounts from the period, and from Thorpe’s biographers, report the king telling him, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world,” and Thorpe reportedly replying, “Thanks, King.” Whether those were the exact words used has been questioned by some historians \u2014 translation and the passage of time complicate the record \u2014 but the sentiment was widely reported and widely believed, because the performance in the stadium had earned it.<\/p>\n
The American team returned home to a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City.<\/p>\n
Thorpe was, in the summer of 1912, perhaps the most famous athlete in the United States.<\/p>\n
Six months later, his medals were gone.<\/p>\n
The reason involved a sum of money that amounted to what a laborer might earn in a few weeks, earned playing baseball in the minor leagues of North Carolina in 1909 and 1910 \u2014 before his Olympic training had even begun.<\/p>\n
The disqualification that followed became, over the following decades, one of the most examined and debated decisions in the history of international sport.<\/p>\n
And the question that outlasted the controversy \u2014 why did it take until 2022 for the official Olympic record to recognize Thorpe as the sole champion of both events? \u2014 turns out to be a story about how institutions make decisions, defend them, revisit them, and eventually reverse them in stages that look like justice but arrive far later than justice required.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Path That Led To Stockholm<\/p>\n
James Francis Thorpe was born in May 1887 \u2014 or 1888; his estate cites the earlier year, official records suggest the later one, and no birth certificate has been located \u2014 near present-day Prague, Oklahoma, in what was then Indian Territory.<\/p>\n
He was a citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation, a people whose ancestral homelands had been in the Great Lakes region before a series of forced removals, treaties, and the upheavals of the nineteenth century had brought them to Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
His Sac and Fox name was Wa-Tho-Huk.<\/p>\n
The translation offered most often is “Bright Path,” though other renderings \u2014 “a path lighted by a great flash of lightning” \u2014 carry a more dramatic quality.<\/p>\n
His father, Hiram Thorpe, was of Sac and Fox and Irish descent.<\/p>\n
His mother, Charlotte Vieux, was of French and Potawatomi ancestry.<\/p>\n
The family background was complicated in the specific way that the collision of Native American and American settler worlds had made complicated across generations \u2014 multiple nations, multiple lines of ancestry, navigating an Indian Territory that was itself being rapidly transformed by the forces of American expansion.<\/p>\n
He grew up on his family’s ranch, hunting and fishing and running.<\/p>\n
He had a twin brother, Charlie, and the death of Charlie from pneumonia when both boys were around nine years old was a blow from which Jim took years to recover.<\/p>\n
He ran away from school after Charlie died \u2014 literally ran, covering twenty-three miles on foot to get home from the Sac and Fox Agency School.<\/p>\n
It was the first demonstration of a physical gift that would eventually define his life.<\/p>\n
The boarding school system found him, as it found most Native children of his generation.<\/p>\n
He attended the Sac and Fox Agency School, then Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In 1904, he arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the institution that the military officer Richard Henry Pratt had founded in 1879 on the philosophy of systematic assimilation \u2014 the goal of replacing Native identity with something that could be absorbed into American mainstream life.<\/p>\n
Carlisle was, by the time Thorpe arrived, the most famous Native American institution in the country, partly because of its athletic programs.<\/p>\n
Thorpe’s mother had died in 1901, and his father died from blood poisoning in 1904, the same year Thorpe enrolled at Carlisle.<\/p>\n
He was, by his mid-teens, an orphan from a family in which loss had come early and often.<\/p>\n
The school that was supposed to strip him of his Sac and Fox identity instead gave him the arena in which the identity he would build for himself \u2014 athlete, champion, survivor \u2014 began to take its mature shape.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The discovery of his athletic ability at Carlisle was, by several accounts, something close to accidental.<\/p>\n
In one of the most cited stories of his biography, a young Thorpe, not yet on the track team, reportedly cleared the high jump bar at a height that the varsity athletes were struggling to reach \u2014 doing so while still wearing street clothes and apparently on impulse.<\/p>\n
Whether the story is precisely accurate or has been embellished through repeated retelling, it captures something true about how his abilities seemed to manifest: casually, abundantly, in ways that appeared to require no particular effort.<\/p>\n
Pop Warner, the legendary football coach who built Carlisle into a power that regularly competed against and often defeated the major universities of the era, recognized what he had.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thorpe became the centerpiece of Carlisle football, named to Walter Camp’s All-America team in both 1911 and 1912.<\/p>\n
In 1911, he scored all of Carlisle’s points in an 18-15 upset of Harvard.<\/p>\n
In 1912, the Carlisle team went 12-1-1, led the nation in scoring, and defeated an Army team that included a young Dwight Eisenhower \u2014 who would speak of Thorpe with something approaching awe fifty years later.<\/p>\n
But football, however significant at Carlisle, was not why Jim Thorpe would be remembered for more than a century.<\/p>\n
That was track and field, and specifically the multi-event competitions at the 1912 Olympics \u2014 competitions he had never before attempted at the highest level.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had not competed in a decathlon before Stockholm.<\/p>\n
He had been selected for the American Olympic team based on his pentathlon performance at the eastern trials, where his dominance was sufficient that the selection committee added him to the decathlon entry as well.<\/p>\n
In Stockholm, he would face athletes who had been specifically preparing for these events \u2014 Hugo Wieslander of Sweden had competed in decathlons constructed specifically for preparation for the Games.<\/p>\n
Thorpe walked in having never done it before.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He won by nearly 700 points.<\/p>\n
What The Rules Said \u2014 And What They Were Actually For<\/p>\n
The Olympic Games of 1912 were the Games of strict amateurism, which meant they were also the Games of a very specific kind of hypocrisy.<\/p>\n
The principle that Olympic athletes must be amateurs \u2014 must not accept payment for athletic performance \u2014 had been part of the Olympic revival since Pierre de Coubertin and his colleagues established the modern Games in 1896.<\/p>\n
The amateur ideal had roots in English upper-class sporting culture, where the idea of earning money from athletics was considered beneath the dignity of a gentleman who competed for the love of the sport and the honor of competition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In practice, this meant that the Olympics were, in 1912, designed for athletes who could afford to train and compete without earning income from sport.<\/p>\n
Athletes from wealthy families could train full-time and compete freely.<\/p>\n
Athletes who needed to work \u2014 and particularly athletes from working-class backgrounds or from communities without economic security \u2014 faced a structural disadvantage that the rules formalized and protected.<\/p>\n
The Amateur Athletic Union of the United States was the gatekeeper of amateur status for American athletes, and it enforced the rules with varying degrees of consistency and rigor.<\/p>\n
It was widely known, and widely tolerated, that college athletes frequently played summer baseball for modest pay under assumed names \u2014 specifically to preserve their amateur status for the purposes of collegiate and Olympic competition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The practice was common enough that it had become an institutional norm, a fiction that everyone maintained because enforcing it rigorously would have depleted the talent pool for American athletics significantly.<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe played summer baseball in 1909 and 1910 for teams in the Eastern Carolina League.<\/p>\n
He played for Rocky Mount and then for Fayetteville, North Carolina.<\/p>\n
He was paid for this \u2014 accounts vary on the specific amounts, with figures ranging from around $2 per game to $60 per month depending on the source and the period \u2014 and he played under his own name.<\/p>\n
That last detail was the difference between Thorpe and his peers who were doing the same thing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Other college athletes who played summer baseball for money used aliases.<\/p>\n
They understood, or had been told, that playing under a false name allowed them to maintain a fiction of amateur purity while still earning the summer income they needed.<\/p>\n
Thorpe, by his own later account, did not understand this.<\/p>\n
He knew he was being paid.<\/p>\n
He did not know that the payment would cost him his Olympic eligibility if it were discovered.<\/p>\n
“I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things,” he wrote in a letter to the secretary of the AAU after the controversy erupted.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I was not very wise in the ways of the world and did not realize this was wrong.”<\/p>\n
The letter is difficult to read without feeling the specific cruelty of the situation.<\/p>\n
He had competed and won honestly, by any athletic measure.<\/p>\n
The payment he had received for playing baseball \u2014 a modest sum, in a minor league, two years before the Olympics \u2014 had nothing to do with the performance he produced in Stockholm.<\/p>\n
And his competitors in the pentathlon and decathlon had done exactly what he had done, by a significant chance, simply under false names.<\/p>\n
How The Story Broke \u2014 And Why The Timing Mattered<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Stockholm Olympics closed in mid-July 1912.<\/p>\n
The protest time limit established by the Swedish Olympic Committee’s rules for the Games was three months \u2014 a provision designed to ensure that results could be challenged while the facts were fresh and the documentation was available.<\/p>\n
Three months passed.<\/p>\n
No protest was filed.<\/p>\n
In early January 1913 \u2014 more than five months after the Games had ended \u2014 a reporter named Roy Johnson at the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts published a story reporting that Jim Thorpe had played professional baseball in the minor leagues before the 1912 Olympics.<\/p>\n
The story was accurate.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was also filed six to seven weeks after the protest deadline, depending on how you counted it.<\/p>\n
The Amateur Athletic Union, confronted with the story and the public attention it generated, moved quickly.<\/p>\n
Rather than noting that the complaint had arrived after the deadline for challenges, the AAU withdrew Thorpe’s amateur status.<\/p>\n
The American Olympic Committee, essentially the same organization in different clothing, referred the matter to the International Olympic Committee.<\/p>\n
The IOC, presented with the AAU’s action, voted unanimously to strip Thorpe of his Olympic titles.<\/p>\n
The official Olympic report for the 1912 Games would later reveal, as the Gilder Lehrman Institute and other scholars have noted, that even the Swedish organizers were uncertain about the proper procedure \u2014 because the protest had clearly arrived after the deadline.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The rules were not followed.<\/p>\n
The committee proceeded anyway.<\/p>\n
Thorpe was directed to return his medals and his trophies.<\/p>\n
He did so without public protest.<\/p>\n
His gold medals were taken from him and given to the athletes who had finished behind him \u2014 Ferdinand Bie of Norway was elevated to first place in the pentathlon, and Hugo Wieslander of Sweden was elevated to first place in the decathlon.<\/p>\n
Their records were changed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thorpe’s performances were removed from the official results.<\/p>\n
The reaction within the athletic establishment was swift and, in certain quarters, uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
Even the letter the AAU national committee sent to the IOC carried a note of ambivalence.<\/p>\n
While condemning Thorpe, the committee added that those who had known about his baseball playing and had remained silent were “deserving of still greater censure.” It was an admission, buried in official language, that the system had failed before it punished the athlete.<\/p>\n
The athletes who were elevated \u2014 Bie and Wieslander \u2014 had their own reactions that would become significant much later.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Both men, by the accounts that survived them, considered themselves to be holders of second place and nothing more.<\/p>\n
Wieslander, who was presented with the decathlon gold medal that should by rights have been his only if Thorpe’s disqualification were valid, reportedly refused to accept it.<\/p>\n
Whether this account is precisely accurate has been questioned, but the family would later confirm, in 2022, that Wieslander had always held Thorpe to be the rightful champion.<\/p>\n
The Athlete Behind The Controversy \u2014 What Happened Next<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe responded to the loss of his Olympic status the way he responded to most of what life had offered him: he kept moving.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On the same day in February 1913 that he sent his medals back to Stockholm, he signed a contract with the New York Giants baseball team.<\/p>\n
The contract, for the remarkable sum of $6,000 per season for three years \u2014 the most ever paid to a major league rookie at the time \u2014 was evidence of how much Thorpe’s celebrity had survived the Olympic controversy intact, at least in the world of professional sports.<\/p>\n
He played six seasons in the major leagues \u2014 for the Giants, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Boston Braves \u2014 finishing his career in 1919 with a lifetime batting average of .252.<\/p>\n
The baseball career was respectable but not spectacular.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He struggled with breaking balls and with the specific demands of major league pitching.<\/p>\n
He was better than average, but he was not the baseball phenomenon that the publicity surrounding his signing had implied he might become.<\/p>\n
It was in professional football that the full scope of his athletic gifts continued to be visible.<\/p>\n
He joined the Canton Bulldogs in 1915 and helped them win three Ohio League championships.<\/p>\n
When the American Professional Football Association \u2014 the organization that would become the NFL \u2014 was formed in 1920, Thorpe served as its first president, a recognition of his standing in the sport even if the administrative role did not suit him particularly.<\/p>\n
He played professional football until he was forty-one years old, competing for more than a dozen different teams across a career that lasted through the 1920s.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The athletic life was remarkable by any measure.<\/p>\n
The life outside it was harder.<\/p>\n
He had married Iva Miller, a Carlisle classmate, in 1913, the same year the Olympic controversy erupted.<\/p>\n
They had four children and divorced later.<\/p>\n
He married again, to Freeda Kirkpatrick, with whom he had four more children, and divorced again.<\/p>\n
A third marriage, to Patricia Gladys Askew, came in 1945.<\/p>\n
He struggled with alcoholism across the later decades of his life.<\/p>\n
He worked as a film extra in Hollywood after his athletic career ended, playing \u2014 with the particular irony that American history had always arranged for him \u2014 uncredited roles as stereotypical Native Americans in productions that reduced the complexity of Indigenous life to props for Western plots.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He died on March 28, 1953, in Lomita, California, practically destitute.<\/p>\n
He was sixty-five years old, or sixty-six, depending on which birth year you accept.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press had already, in 1950, voted him the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n
He owned almost nothing.<\/p>\n
The medals were gone.<\/p>\n
His scores were out of the record book.<\/p>\n
And the question of whether the disqualification had been justified \u2014 whether the rules had even been followed \u2014 would not be seriously reconsidered for another twenty years.<\/p>\n
Why The Fight Didn’t End With Him<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe was not, by the accounts of people who knew him, a man who spent his final years agitating for the return of his Olympic titles.<\/p>\n
“I won ’em, and I know I won ’em,” he told his daughter Grace.<\/p>\n
On another occasion, he reportedly said he had played “with the heart of an amateur \u2014 for the pure hell of it.” These are the words of a man who had made his peace with a situation he could not change, not a man consumed by grievance.<\/p>\n
He lived with the injury without making the injury the center of his public identity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But those around him \u2014 his children, his biographers, the Native American community that had watched one of its most celebrated members be stripped of his titles \u2014 did not share his equanimity, or at least did not feel that equanimity was the right response to what had happened.<\/p>\n
The Amateur Athletic Union restored Thorpe’s amateur status in 1973, two decades after his death.<\/p>\n
The restoration was largely symbolic at that point \u2014 you cannot restore amateur status to someone who has been dead for twenty years and whose playing career ended in 1928 \u2014 but it was a formal acknowledgment that the original decision had been wrong, or at minimum that the category the AAU had punished him for violating no longer made sense.<\/p>\n
The restoration of the amateur status did nothing to change the Olympic record.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thorpe still did not appear in the official results of the 1912 Games.<\/p>\n
Ferdinand Bie was still listed as the pentathlon gold medalist.<\/p>\n
Hugo Wieslander was still listed as the decathlon gold medalist.<\/p>\n
The scores that Thorpe had achieved, the world record in the decathlon that would stand until 1948, were not in the books.<\/p>\n
The campaign to change that belonged, in its later stages, primarily to Grace Thorpe, Jim’s daughter, and to Robert Wheeler, a scholar who had written a biography of Thorpe and who had spent years researching the procedural history of the 1913 disqualification.<\/p>\n
It was Wheeler who discovered what proved to be the decisive piece of evidence: that the Swedish Olympic Committee’s rules for the 1912 Games had established a protest deadline of three months after the events, and that the complaint against Thorpe had arrived months after that deadline.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The IOC, in other words, had not merely been harsh or inflexible in punishing Thorpe.<\/p>\n
It had also been operating outside its own rules in accepting the protest at all.<\/p>\n
This discovery, combined with the sustained advocacy of the Thorpe family and the growing political pressure from American political figures who supported reinstatement, finally moved the IOC to act.<\/p>\n
In October 1982, the IOC Executive Committee voted to restore Thorpe’s honors.<\/p>\n
The 70-year marathon, as one of Thorpe’s daughters would call it, appeared to be over.<\/p>\n
It was not.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Partial Reinstatement \u2014 And The Small, Mean Sentence<\/p>\n
The IOC’s 1982 decision had a specific shape that mattered enormously, though it took some time for that shape to become fully visible.<\/p>\n
The original medals from the 1912 Games had been in museum collections, but they were stolen and have never been recovered.<\/p>\n
The IOC arranged for new medals to be struck from the original molds \u2014 not of solid gold, which had not been used for Olympic medals since 1912, but of the modern silver alloy with gold plating.<\/p>\n
IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch presented these commemorative medals at a ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on January 18, 1983, attended by several of Thorpe’s children.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grace Thorpe and her sister Charlotte received the medals.<\/p>\n
Charlotte said, at the ceremony, that “the 70-year-old marathon is over.” Grace said she thought her father would have simply said, “It’s about time.”<\/p>\n
The ceremony was emotional and widely covered.<\/p>\n
To most observers, it looked like the culmination of a long and just campaign \u2014 the restoration of a wrong that should never have occurred.<\/p>\n
But the IOC had attached something to its 1982 decision that transformed its meaning.<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian Magazine, in a 2013 investigation of why the recognition was still incomplete, described it precisely: along with the announcement that Thorpe’s name would be added to the list of Olympic champions for 1912, the IOC had appended a small but decisive qualification.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The official report for the Games would not be changed.<\/p>\n
The other athletes \u2014 Bie and Wieslander \u2014 would retain the rankings and records they had been given after the 1913 disqualification.<\/p>\n
And the IOC declared Thorpe not the sole winner of the two events, but a co-champion.<\/p>\n
Equal in the record to the two men he had defeated by enormous margins.<\/p>\n
This was, as the Gilder Lehrman Institute put it later, “a sports absurdity.” Two gold medalists in a single competition.<\/p>\n
Thorpe officially the same as the men he had beaten by hundreds of points, without his actual scores being entered in the official record.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had won the decathlon by 688 points.<\/p>\n
He was now listed as sharing the gold medal with the man who had finished 688 points behind him.<\/p>\n
Bie and Wieslander themselves had always disputed the justice of what had been given to them.<\/p>\n
The Swedish Olympic Committee and Wieslander’s family would later confirm, in the context of the 2022 campaign, that Wieslander had held throughout his life that Thorpe was the rightful champion.<\/p>\n
He had refused to accept the gold medal in 1913 when it was first offered to him, though accounts of this differ slightly across sources.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But in 1983, the IOC was not prepared to fully undo what it had done in 1913.<\/p>\n
It recognized the wrong.<\/p>\n
It provided a gesture of remediation.<\/p>\n
It refused to complete the reversal.<\/p>\n
For the family, and for the advocates who had worked for decades to reach even this incomplete resolution, the partial reinstatement was better than nothing.<\/p>\n
Grace Thorpe continued to advocate for full recognition.<\/p>\n
The Wheaties cereal company did not put Thorpe on a box until 2001, after a letter-writing campaign \u2014 an absence that reflected, in miniature, how incomplete the popular recognition of what Thorpe had actually achieved remained decades after his death.<\/p>\n
The question of whether the official Olympic record would ever be fully corrected became the next stage of a fight that had now lasted longer than Thorpe’s entire life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Second Opening \u2014 Why The Story Was Not Over<\/p>\n
More than a century after the Stockholm Olympics, most people who knew Jim Thorpe’s story thought they understood it.<\/p>\n
He had won.<\/p>\n
The titles had been taken.<\/p>\n
He had been restored, at least partially.<\/p>\n
The family had the commemorative medals.<\/p>\n
The wrong had been acknowledged.<\/p>\n
What most accounts of the story missed \u2014 or glossed over \u2014 was that the official Olympic historical record, as it stood from 1983 until 2022, still listed two gold medalists in the pentathlon and two gold medalists in the decathlon.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The athlete who had beaten everyone else by hundreds of points was officially the equal of the man he had defeated.<\/p>\n
His scores \u2014 the world record performance in the decathlon \u2014 were not in the standard results.<\/p>\n
The record that stood until 1948 was not in the books where it belonged.<\/p>\n
This was not a technicality.<\/p>\n
It was a substantial and visible gap between what the 1982 reinstatement had declared \u2014 that Thorpe was an Olympic champion \u2014 and what the official historical record showed.<\/p>\n
For Anita DeFrantz, a former Olympic rower and one of the highest-ranking Americans in the IOC, this was the unfinished business.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In an interview published around 2021, as the campaign for full reinstatement was building, she was direct: “It’s the right thing to do.<\/p>\n
In this time of social reckoning, let’s right this wrong.<\/p>\n
We can’t change the past but what we can do with better information is to correct it.”<\/p>\n
The organization that had been pushing for the correction was called Bright Path Strong \u2014 a reference to Thorpe’s Sac and Fox name, Wa-Tho-Huk.<\/p>\n
In July 2020, they began circulating a petition calling on the IOC to reinstate Thorpe as the sole winner in both events.<\/p>\n
The petition was supported by Billy Mills, a Lakota Oglala Sioux runner who had won gold in the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics \u2014 himself one of the most significant Native American athletic achievements in Olympic history \u2014 and who understood from his own experience what it meant to carry the weight of Indigenous representation in international sport.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The campaign engaged directly with the specific obstacle that had prevented full reinstatement in 1982: the question of what happened to Bie and Wieslander.<\/p>\n
They had been elevated to gold medal status in 1913.<\/p>\n
They had been listed as gold medalists, or co-gold medalists, ever since.<\/p>\n
Completing Thorpe’s reinstatement as sole champion required, in the IOC’s view, the consent or at least the agreement of the relevant national Olympic committees and, ideally, of the surviving families of the affected athletes.<\/p>\n
What happened next was something that the advocates could not have guaranteed but that turned out to be true: both families, in Norway and Sweden, held the same view that Wieslander and Bie themselves had apparently held in their lifetimes.<\/p>\n
They considered Thorpe to be the rightful champion.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Norwegian Family, The Swedish Family, And What They Said<\/p>\n
The resolution that came in 2022 depended on the specific actions of two families on opposite sides of the Atlantic, in Norway and Sweden, who were asked to respond to a question that had been waiting for more than a century.<\/p>\n
Ferdinand Bie, the Norwegian athlete who had finished second to Thorpe in the pentathlon and been elevated to first place after the 1913 disqualification, had his own family.<\/p>\n
The Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports consulted with them about the proposed reinstatement of Thorpe as the sole gold medalist.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hugo Wieslander, the Swedish athlete elevated to first place in the decathlon, had a family that had been engaged with the Thorpe story for decades.<\/p>\n
The Swedish Olympic Committee’s involvement in the campaign to restore Thorpe was not incidental \u2014 it reflected a long-standing position that Wieslander himself had held.<\/p>\n
The family confirmed, in the context of the 2022 negotiations, that Wieslander had always considered himself to be at best a silver medalist, never a gold medalist, and had recognized Thorpe as the true champion.<\/p>\n
This alignment \u2014 the families of both elevated athletes endorsing Thorpe’s reinstatement as sole champion \u2014 gave the IOC the specific cover it needed to act without a dispute about the rights of the previously recognized athletes.<\/p>\n
On July 14, 2022, the IOC voted to reinstate Jim Thorpe as the sole winner of both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The announcement came on July 15, 2022 \u2014 the 110th anniversary of Thorpe’s decathlon victory.<\/p>\n
IOC President Thomas Bach issued a statement calling it “a most exceptional and unique situation” addressed by “an extraordinary gesture of fair play from the National Olympic Committees concerned.” Bie was listed as co-winner of the silver medal in the pentathlon alongside James Donahue, the American who had originally been elevated to silver.<\/p>\n
Wieslander was moved to silver in the decathlon.<\/p>\n
The arrangement preserved something for the families of Bie and Wieslander while completing what had been left incomplete in 1982.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The athletes who had been given elevated rankings in 1913 did not lose all recognition; they simply moved to the positions that more accurately reflected their performance behind Thorpe.<\/p>\n
Thorpe’s grandson John, reached by journalists after the announcement, said he could hardly sleep when he heard the news.<\/p>\n
“We’ve all waited so long for this and we’re ecstatic.<\/p>\n
I just hope the war is over now and nothing else pops up.”<\/p>\n
It had taken a hundred and nine years from the original disqualification.<\/p>\n
What The Amateurism Rule Actually Was \u2014 And What It Was For<\/p>\n
The disqualification of Jim Thorpe has sometimes been presented as straightforwardly a case of racial discrimination \u2014 the convenient application of a rule against a Native American athlete that would not have been applied against a white one.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The truth, as with most historical decisions involving both institutional rule-enforcement and the specific vulnerabilities of the people those rules fall hardest on, is somewhat more complex.<\/p>\n
The amateurism rule was real, and it was genuinely applied.<\/p>\n
The Olympic Games of 1912 operated under a clear prohibition on athletes who had received payment for athletic performance.<\/p>\n
The rule was not invented for Thorpe.<\/p>\n
The question of whether it was applied selectively \u2014 whether other athletes who had done similar things were protected by the fiction of assumed names while Thorpe, who had played under his own name, was exposed \u2014 is a legitimate one.<\/p>\n
What is documented is that the practice of college athletes playing summer baseball for pay under false names was widespread, well known, and tolerated.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thorpe’s biographers have noted that this practice was standard enough to have become institutional custom.<\/p>\n
The athletes who used aliases were doing so precisely because they understood that playing under their own names would expose them to what Thorpe faced.<\/p>\n
Thorpe, by multiple accounts, simply did not know this.<\/p>\n
Whether the people who knew about Thorpe’s baseball playing \u2014 and some people at Carlisle and in the AAU apparently did know, before the Olympics \u2014 chose not to raise the issue because they believed it was not serious, or because they did not want to lose their best athlete, or because they assumed the time limit on protests would protect him if it ever came out, is not entirely clear from the surviving record.<\/p>\n
The AAU letter to the IOC acknowledged that those who knew and stayed silent “are deserving of still greater censure for their silence.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What is also documented is the specific context in which Thorpe navigated these rules.<\/p>\n
He was a Sac and Fox citizen who had grown up in Indian Territory, been put through a boarding school system designed to systematically replace Native identity with something else, and who had \u2014 by his own account \u2014 genuinely not understood the rule he was breaking.<\/p>\n
The letter he wrote to the AAU is not the letter of a man who cynically bent the rules and was caught.<\/p>\n
It is the letter of someone who did not know the rule existed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The disparity between how carefully the rules protected athletes who knew about them \u2014 who used aliases precisely because they understood the consequences \u2014 and how thoroughly they exposed an athlete who did not know about them is not the same as documented discrimination in the application of the rules.<\/p>\n
But it reflects a structural reality: the rules were designed by and for people who had been taught to navigate them, and the athlete who bore the full cost of their enforcement was someone who had been deliberately excluded from the circles where that knowledge was transmitted.<\/p>\n
The AAU was, in 1913, an organization with specific cultural assumptions about who athletes were and how they operated.<\/p>\n
Thorpe, as a Native American man who had come through a boarding school system and who played minor league baseball under his own name because he did not know he should do otherwise, fell outside those assumptions in ways that cost him everything the Games had given him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Avery Brundage \u2014 The Villain Who Did Not Quite Fit The Role<\/p>\n
Any account of Jim Thorpe and the amateurism controversy has to contend with Avery Brundage, because Brundage has been cast, with some regularity, as the villain of the piece.<\/p>\n
Brundage competed at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics himself, in the decathlon and pentathlon \u2014 finishing fifteenth in one and fifth in the other, nowhere near Thorpe’s level.<\/p>\n
He went on to become one of the most powerful figures in American and international amateur sport, eventually serving as president of the IOC from 1952 to 1972.<\/p>\n
He was a rigorous, some would say fanatical, defender of amateur principles, and he dismissed petitions for Thorpe’s reinstatement repeatedly over his twenty years as IOC president.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The suggestion that Brundage was involved in the original 1913 disqualification \u2014 that he was, in some accounts, the person who reported Thorpe to the authorities \u2014 has been examined by Thorpe’s biographers and largely set aside.<\/p>\n
Robert Wheeler, who wrote what is considered the most authoritative scholarly biography of Thorpe, found no credible evidence that Brundage was involved in the original complaint.<\/p>\n
The reporter who broke the story was Roy Johnson of the Worcester Telegram.<\/p>\n
The person most directly responsible for how the AAU responded was James E.<\/p>\n
Sullivan, the powerful head of the AAU, described by those who studied him as a “self-righteous, vindictive sort.”<\/p>\n
What Brundage did do, across his long tenure at the top of amateur sport, was repeatedly and curtly dismiss efforts to restore Thorpe’s Olympic recognition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was consistent in his application of amateurism rules across the board \u2014 he made enemies everywhere by his rigidity \u2014 but his specific resistance to Thorpe’s reinstatement, and the length of time that resistance could be maintained while he held power, was part of what made the campaign so long and so difficult.<\/p>\n
His retirement from the IOC in 1972, after his handling of the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics drew widespread condemnation, effectively ended the most significant institutional obstacle to Thorpe’s reinstatement.<\/p>\n
The AAU voted to restore Thorpe’s amateur status the following year.<\/p>\n
The campaign that culminated in the 1982 IOC decision to restore his honors was able to proceed, partly, because the man who had blocked it longest was no longer in a position to block it.<\/p>\n
The Specific Records That Were Broken By Time Itself<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One of the details about Jim Thorpe’s 1912 decathlon that stops the reader and demands a moment of attention is this: his world record in the event, set that July afternoon in Stockholm, was not broken until 1948.<\/p>\n
Thirty-six years.<\/p>\n
Two world wars.<\/p>\n
The entire transformation of amateur athletics as an institution, the gradual improvement of training methods and equipment and nutrition science that characterize the mid-century period of sport \u2014 none of it was enough to surpass what a twenty-four-year-old Sac and Fox athlete did in Stockholm without a decathlon coach, without specialized decathlon training, and apparently without having competed in the event before.<\/p>\n
The 1,500-meter run that closed the decathlon \u2014 the event that determines the outcome of close competitions because the longer the distance, the more it exposes training gaps \u2014 Thorpe ran in four minutes and 40.1 seconds.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was faster than any decathlete would run until 1972.<\/p>\n
These are not marginal performances.<\/p>\n
They are not the performances of someone who happened to be better than a thin field on a particular day.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The question was whether those modest payments \u2014 paid for baseball, not for track and field or anything related to the Olympic events \u2014 had corrupted a performance that was manifestly the result of something else entirely.<\/p>\n
The 1912 Olympic rules did not require a showing that the prior professional activity had produced an advantage in the specific events at issue.<\/p>\n
They required only that the athlete had received payment for athletic performance of any kind.<\/p>\n
The rule was categorical, and its application to Thorpe was categorical.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Decade Between The Two Campaigns<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The thirty years between Thorpe’s death in 1953 and the 1983 ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel were not years in which the campaign for reinstatement was static.<\/p>\n
They were years in which the effort moved through different phases, ran into different obstacles, and eventually found the specific leverage point that could move the IOC.<\/p>\n
The discovery of the time-limit rule was not made early.<\/p>\n
For much of the period after Thorpe’s death, the argument for reinstatement rested on equity and fairness \u2014 on the argument that the punishment was disproportionate, that the rule had been applied selectively, that the payment Thorpe had received was too modest and too unrelated to his Olympic performance to justify removing him from the record.<\/p>\n
These arguments were morally compelling and legally inadequate.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What Robert Wheeler found, in years of archival research, was the specific provision in the Swedish Olympic Committee’s 1912 rules establishing the three-month protest window \u2014 and the evidence that the complaint against Thorpe had arrived outside that window.<\/p>\n
This transformed the argument from “the rule was unfair” to “the rule wasn’t even followed.” It was, as the American Indian Magazine described it in a retrospective account, a “stroke of luck and good research.”<\/p>\n
The political dimension of the campaign was also significant.<\/p>\n
American political figures had been lobbying the IOC since at least the 1970s.<\/p>\n
The United States Olympic Committee, restructured by federal legislation that took Olympic athletics out of the AAU’s sole control, had a different organizational posture toward the question.<\/p>\n
The legislative changes that came in the late 1970s, which explicitly allowed corporate sponsorship for Olympic athletes \u2014 addressing one of the underlying tensions of the amateurism controversy \u2014 created an environment in which the rigid amateur rules of 1912 looked not just outdated but actively strange.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Brundage’s death in 1975 removed the most persistent individual obstacle.<\/p>\n
His successor as IOC president, Lord Killanin, was more sympathetic to the Thorpe campaign, and his successor, Juan Antonio Samaranch, presided over the October 1982 vote that restored Thorpe’s honors \u2014 and the January 1983 ceremony at which the replica medals were presented to Thorpe’s children.<\/p>\n
The campaign had worked.<\/p>\n
The result it achieved was partial.<\/p>\n
And the understanding of why the result was partial \u2014 why the IOC had declared co-championships rather than sole victories, why the scores had not been entered in the official record \u2014 would take another generation to fully articulate and address.<\/p>\n
How Institutions Correct Old Decisions \u2014 And Why They Do It In Stages<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The story of Jim Thorpe’s posthumous reinstatement is, among other things, a study in how large international institutions reverse decisions they have made, and why those reversals tend to happen incrementally rather than all at once.<\/p>\n
The IOC in 1982 was confronted with evidence that it had, in 1913, violated its own rules in accepting a protest after the established deadline.<\/p>\n
It could have responded by fully reversing the 1913 decision \u2014 declaring Thorpe the sole champion, removing the co-championship designation, restoring his scores to the official record.<\/p>\n
It did not do this.<\/p>\n
The reasons involved competing obligations.<\/p>\n
The athletes who had been given elevated status in 1913 were not simply bureaucratic placeholders.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were real people with real families, and those families had real investment in the recognition that had come down through the decades.<\/p>\n
Ferdinand Bie’s gold medal in the pentathlon, and Hugo Wieslander’s gold medal in the decathlon, were part of their athletic identities and their family histories.<\/p>\n
To fully reverse the 1913 decision required confronting what that reversal meant for them.<\/p>\n
The co-championship solution was a compromise \u2014 one that acknowledged Thorpe’s claim while not fully addressing the problem with how the previous decision had been made.<\/p>\n
It was, as critics noted, a “sports absurdity.” But it was the kind of absurdity that allowed the IOC to make a gesture toward justice while avoiding the harder question of what complete justice required.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 2022 decision required what 1982 had not achieved: the consent of the Norwegian and Swedish families of the elevated athletes.<\/p>\n
When those families provided that consent \u2014 indeed, when they actively affirmed that their predecessors had always considered Thorpe the true champion \u2014 the last obstacle to full reinstatement was removed.<\/p>\n
The IOC framed the 2022 decision as the result of “an extraordinary gesture of fair play” by the national Olympic committees of Norway and Sweden and by the Wieslander and Bie families.<\/p>\n
This framing is accurate, as far as it goes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The gesture was genuine.<\/p>\n
What the framing does not fully capture is that those families were confirming something that the athletes themselves had apparently believed all along: that the gold medals they had been given were not legitimately theirs, and that the man who beat them was the man the record should show.<\/p>\n
The institution had needed the cover of family consent to complete a correction that the evidence had demanded for decades.<\/p>\n
The families provided it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The record was corrected.<\/p>\n
The Man Who Represented His Country Before It Made Him A Citizen<\/p>\n
One of the dimensions of Jim Thorpe’s story that the standard retelling underemphasizes is the specific citizenship status of the man who won those gold medals under the American flag in 1912.<\/p>\n
Native Americans were not recognized as citizens of the United States until 1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act was passed.<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe competed in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, won two gold medals representing the United States, was celebrated with a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City, and then had his titles stripped \u2014 all while being a member of a nation whose people would not be granted U.S. citizenship for another twelve years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He competed for a country that had not yet decided to count him as a member of it.<\/p>\n
He carried the American flag in the sense that he competed on the American team, but the legal and political relationship between that flag and the man who carried it was not the straightforward one that the celebration implied.<\/p>\n
This context does not change the specific legal mechanism of the disqualification \u2014 the amateurism rule applied to all Olympic athletes regardless of citizenship status.<\/p>\n
But it adds a layer of meaning to the question of what was being taken from him, and from whom.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was not simply an athlete who lost a sports dispute.<\/p>\n
He was a Sac and Fox man who had come through the boarding school system, who had been celebrated by the country whose citizenship he did not yet hold, and who was then stripped of that celebration based on rules that the institution that stripped him had not even properly followed.<\/p>\n
“He represented this country before it even recognized Native Americans as citizens,” said Representative Deb Haaland \u2014 herself a citizen of Laguna Pueblo and later the first Native American to serve as Secretary of the Interior \u2014 in her statement welcoming the 2022 reinstatement.<\/p>\n
“He did so with humility and grace.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Even after he was wronged by his coach, the American Athletic Union, and many others, he never gave in to bitterness and led with a spirit of generosity and kindness.”<\/p>\n
The reference to “his coach” is an allusion to Pop Warner’s role in the situation.<\/p>\n
Warner, who coached Thorpe at Carlisle and was instrumental in steering him toward the Olympics, has been the subject of varying assessments of his culpability.<\/p>\n
The prevailing view among Thorpe’s biographers is that Warner knew about the baseball playing and chose not to disclose it \u2014 that his silence was strategic, keeping his most valuable athlete eligible for the Olympics rather than risking his disqualification before the Games.<\/p>\n
Warner received a payment from the Giants when he steered Thorpe toward that contract after the Olympic scandal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His role in the affair was complicated and not particularly heroic.<\/p>\n
The Larger Story That The Medals Could Not Contain<\/p>\n
By the time the IOC made its 2022 announcement, Jim Thorpe had become something considerably larger than the story of two gold medals and a disqualification.<\/p>\n
He had been named the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century by the Associated Press in 1950.<\/p>\n
He had been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963, as part of its inaugural class.<\/p>\n
His decathlon world record had stood for thirty-six years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His professional sports career had lasted until he was forty-one.<\/p>\n
And he had become, across the decades since his death, one of the most significant figures in the history of Native American representation in American public life.<\/p>\n
Not the only such figure \u2014 not a simple symbol, reduced to what a symbol requires \u2014 but a person whose specific life and specific achievements had been used, by Native communities and by American society more broadly, to demonstrate something about what Native Americans could do when given access to arenas that had been designed without them in mind.<\/p>\n
The boarding school system had been designed to eliminate Jim Thorpe’s Sac and Fox identity and replace it with something more convenient for American purposes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What it produced, instead, was someone who could defeat every athlete in the world in the two hardest multi-event competitions the Olympic program had to offer, who did it in front of thousands of spectators and a Swedish king, and who carried the whole of what he was \u2014 the orphan, the Sac and Fox citizen, the Carlisle graduate, the minor league baseball player \u2014 onto that track in Stockholm and ran it into history.<\/p>\n
The medals were the evidence.<\/p>\n
They were not the thing itself.<\/p>\n
The thing itself was a specific person with a specific origin, a specific path through the most brutalizing aspects of American policy toward Native peoples, and a specific set of gifts that the world had to acknowledge even when the institutions that governed sport refused to do so for more than a century.<\/p>\n
Thorpe died poor, largely forgotten by the mainstream, his Olympic titles still stripped from the record.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It took a hundred and ten years to get there.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What The Official Record Now Says \u2014 And What It Cannot Repair<\/p>\n
As of July 2022, the official Olympic historical record lists Jim Thorpe as the sole gold medalist in the pentathlon and the sole gold medalist in the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Games.<\/p>\n
Hugo Wieslander is the silver medalist in the decathlon.<\/p>\n
Ferdinand Bie and James Donahue are co-silver medalists in the pentathlon.<\/p>\n
The record that Thorpe set in the decathlon \u2014 8,412 points under the scoring system used in 1912 \u2014 is in the books.<\/p>\n
The performance that stood until 1948, the 1,500-meter run that would not be matched by a decathlete until 1972, is part of the documented history of the event.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What cannot be repaired is everything that the delay cost \u2014 the thirty years that passed while Thorpe was alive and his titles were gone, the twenty years after his death before the AAU restored his amateur status, the further decade before the IOC granted partial recognition, the forty more years before full recognition was achieved.<\/p>\n
The hundred and nine years between the disqualification and the correction were not an administrative abstraction.<\/p>\n
They were the years of a man’s life, and his children’s lives, and his grandchildren’s lives, lived under the shadow of a decision that the institution itself had not made correctly.<\/p>\n
The original gold medals are gone \u2014 stolen from museum collections decades ago and never recovered.<\/p>\n
The replica medals presented to Thorpe’s family in 1983 exist.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They carry the weight of a long and painful history, and they are gold-plated rather than gold, which is itself a kind of metaphor that the story did not ask for but received anyway.<\/p>\n
The men who were elevated in Thorpe’s place in 1913 have now been returned to their actual finishing positions.<\/p>\n
Their families endorsed the change, because the families, like the athletes themselves, had always known the result was wrong.<\/p>\n
The IOC described what happened in 2022 as an exceptional and unique situation, addressed through the fair play of the concerned committees and families.<\/p>\n
That framing is not inaccurate.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe did not need the IOC to tell him he had won.<\/p>\n
“I won ’em, and I know I won ’em,” he had said.<\/p>\n
He died knowing that.<\/p>\n
The documentation of what he knew took considerably longer.<\/p>\n
The score that stands in the record \u2014 8,412 points, July 15, 1912, Stockholm \u2014 is the most durable thing he left behind.<\/p>\n
It is there now.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was always his.<\/p>\n
The Culture Of Amateurism \u2014 And Who It Actually Protected<\/p>\n
To understand why Jim Thorpe’s disqualification lasted as long as it did, you have to understand what the amateurism rule was actually protecting \u2014 and for whom it was designed.<\/p>\n
The word “amateur” derives from the Latin for love \u2014 the amateur, in the original conception, plays for the love of the game rather than for financial reward.<\/p>\n
In the world of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century athletics, this distinction carried enormous social weight because it was, in practice, a class distinction.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Working-class athletes who needed to earn money from their athletic ability \u2014 who could not afford the luxury of competing purely for love \u2014 were structurally excluded from this conception of the Olympic ideal.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe did not play under an assumed name.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He played under his own name, which meant that when a Massachusetts newspaper reporter found the record of his Eastern Carolina League appearances, there was no fiction to maintain.<\/p>\n
The structure of the amateurism rule, and its selective non-enforcement through the false-name convention, created a situation in which athletes who were well-connected enough, or well-advised enough, to know the rules could preserve their Olympic eligibility while doing exactly what Thorpe did.<\/p>\n
Thorpe, who had come through a boarding school system that was explicitly designed to exclude Native Americans from the full knowledge and navigational tools of American institutional life, did not have that knowledge.<\/p>\n
He paid for its absence.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This does not make the 1913 disqualification explicitly racially motivated in the documented sense of a decision made because of Thorpe’s Native identity.<\/p>\n
It does make the disqualification a product of a system in which the specific knowledge needed to protect oneself from the rules was unequally distributed, and in which the athlete who lacked that knowledge bore the full consequence while athletes with the same conduct but more institutional savvy did not.<\/p>\n
The AAU committee’s own letter acknowledged this \u2014 that those who knew and stayed silent bore blame.<\/p>\n
But the acknowledgment was not followed by action.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The rules were applied to Thorpe and not to those who had arranged the silence that protected everyone else.<\/p>\n
The Football Career That Carried The Name Forward<\/p>\n
While the Olympic controversy dominated the headlines in 1913, Jim Thorpe went on to build a professional athletic career that would have secured his reputation even without the Stockholm medals.<\/p>\n
His major league baseball career \u2014 six seasons with the New York Giants, Cincinnati Reds, and Boston Braves from 1913 through 1919 \u2014 was respectable but not spectacular.<\/p>\n
He batted .252 lifetime, hit seven home runs, and drove in 82 runs across 289 major league games.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was a capable outfielder with a powerful arm and good speed.<\/p>\n
He was not, however, the baseball phenomenon that the mythology of his athletic genius might have suggested.<\/p>\n
He struggled with breaking pitches, with the specific technical demands of major league pitching, and with the personality of Giants manager John McGraw, who had his own ideas about how to use a player he had paid the most ever given to a major league rookie.<\/p>\n
The professional football career was something else.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When Thorpe joined the Canton Bulldogs in 1915, professional football was still in a pre-organizational period \u2014 teams competed in various regional leagues, rules were not standardized, and the sport occupied a decidedly lower status in American sports culture than college football or major league baseball.<\/p>\n
Thorpe’s presence in the Ohio League and later in the early NFL was one of the things that began to change this.<\/p>\n
He was a powerful tailback, a punter, a place kicker, a return man, a defensive force.<\/p>\n
He could do everything a football player of the early twentieth century was asked to do, and he could do it better than most of the people who had been doing it for years.<\/p>\n
The Canton Bulldogs, with Thorpe as the centerpiece, won three Ohio League championships.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Bulldogs were among the charter members of the American Professional Football Association \u2014 the organization that became the NFL in 1922 \u2014 and Thorpe served as its first president.<\/p>\n
His football career lasted until 1928, when he was forty years old or forty-one, depending on the birth year dispute.<\/p>\n
He played for more than a dozen different teams across a career that spanned the entire formative period of professional football in the United States.<\/p>\n
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in its inaugural class in 1963, alongside players whose names became foundational to the sport’s history.<\/p>\n
The football career meant that Thorpe remained a visible public figure through the 1920s, at a time when his Olympic titles had been stripped and his baseball career was winding down.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was not, in the public imagination of those years, the fallen Olympic champion.<\/p>\n
He was a football player \u2014 the most famous Native American athlete in the country, competing in a sport that was still defining itself.<\/p>\n
And even as his playing career ended, he found ways to remain connected to the public life of sport.<\/p>\n
He worked in Hollywood from the late 1920s onward, appearing in dozens of films in uncredited roles \u2014 most of them playing generic Native American characters in Westerns, the particular Hollywood shorthand for Indigenous life that reduced centuries of cultural complexity to a few recognizable images.<\/p>\n
He also tried, with varying success, to form a casting agency that would push for the hiring of actual Native American performers rather than the European-American actors who typically played Native roles on screen.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He died in 1953 having done all of this, having built an athletic career that would have been extraordinary even without the Olympic medals, having tried to leverage his fame into something that helped the communities he came from, and having lived with the specific knowledge that his greatest athletic achievements were not in the official record.<\/p>\n
The Boarding School Dimension \u2014 What Carlisle Was Doing While He Was There<\/p>\n
Any full account of Jim Thorpe’s story requires honesty about what Carlisle Indian Industrial School was and what it was designed to accomplish.<\/p>\n
Richard Henry Pratt founded Carlisle in 1879 on the philosophy he summarized as “Kill the Indian, save the man.” The school was designed not to educate Native children in the way that education is typically understood \u2014 building on the knowledge and values of the student’s community \u2014 but to replace that community with something else.<\/p>\n
Students were forbidden to speak their Native languages.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Their hair was cut.<\/p>\n
They were dressed in uniforms.<\/p>\n
They were assigned English names.<\/p>\n
They were drilled in the skills and habits of Euro-American working life.<\/p>\n
The goal was assimilation so thorough that the student’s Native identity would be effectively replaced.<\/p>\n
Thorpe arrived at Carlisle in 1904, at around sixteen years old.<\/p>\n
He had already lost his twin brother, his mother, and, by the same year, his father.<\/p>\n
He was an orphan from a Sac and Fox family in Oklahoma, dropped into an institution in Pennsylvania that was designed to make him someone different from who he was.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What Carlisle also had was an athletic program that Pop Warner had built into something genuinely remarkable.<\/p>\n
The Carlisle Indians competed against Harvard, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Army, and the other major universities of the era \u2014 and often won.<\/p>\n
The athletic success served Pratt’s institutional goals in a specific way: it demonstrated, to the American public and to politicians who controlled the school’s funding, that Native Americans could compete successfully in a mainstream American arena.<\/p>\n
The games were not simple sport.<\/p>\n
They were arguments.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For Thorpe, the athletics were also something more immediate: they were the arena in which his specific gifts could be fully expressed, and in which the losses and disruptions of his early life could be, temporarily at least, set aside.<\/p>\n
He was not the most educated student at Carlisle.<\/p>\n
He was not the most well-adjusted.<\/p>\n
He ran away from the school multiple times, drawn back to Oklahoma and to the ranch where he had grown up, unable to fully commit to the institutional life the school demanded.<\/p>\n
But on the track and on the football field, the hesitations and ambivalences disappeared.<\/p>\n
What remained was a person of extraordinary capability, competing against the best opposition available and winning consistently.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The irony that the boarding school system \u2014 the institution that had been designed to take something from Thorpe and children like him \u2014 provided the arena in which his most celebrated achievements were possible is not an argument for the system.<\/p>\n
It is an argument about the specific kind of person that survived the system’s attempts, and about the way that institutional contexts designed for one purpose can produce outcomes their designers did not anticipate.<\/p>\n
Thorpe was not made by Carlisle.<\/p>\n
He survived Carlisle, took from it what he needed, and became himself in spite of what it was designed to do.<\/p>\n
The People Who Kept The Campaign Alive \u2014 Grace Thorpe And Others<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The decades-long campaign to restore Jim Thorpe’s Olympic recognition was not primarily the work of institutions.<\/p>\n
It was the work of people \u2014 people who knew him, or knew of him, and who refused to accept that the institutional record was the final word.<\/p>\n
Grace Thorpe was the most visible of these.<\/p>\n
She was Thorpe’s daughter, and she had received the replica medals at the 1983 ceremony.<\/p>\n
She spent years following the ceremony arguing that the partial reinstatement \u2014 the co-championship designation, the absence of her father’s scores from the official results \u2014 was not sufficient.<\/p>\n
She was present at every stage of the campaign, providing testimony, providing context, keeping the question alive in conversations with officials and journalists and members of Congress who might have allowed the 1983 ceremony to be the end of the story.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grace Thorpe died in 2008.<\/p>\n
She did not see the full reinstatement of 2022.<\/p>\n
Her grandson John, who found out about the July 2022 decision while living in Honduras, had to process from a distance what she had worked toward for decades and never fully achieved in her lifetime.<\/p>\n
Robert Wheeler, Thorpe’s biographer, was the scholar who found the specific archival evidence \u2014 the three-month protest window, the documentation that the complaint had arrived outside it \u2014 that gave the reinstatement campaign its strongest legal and procedural argument.<\/p>\n
His work transformed the argument from a moral appeal to a procedural one, and procedural arguments are the ones that institutional bodies like the IOC are equipped to act on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Billy Mills, the Lakota Oglala runner who had won gold in the 10,000 meters in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics \u2014 one of the great upsets in Olympic history, and itself a remarkable Native American athletic achievement \u2014 was among the supporters of the Bright Path Strong petition.<\/p>\n
His involvement connected the campaign to the living tradition of Native American Olympic achievement, reminding anyone who needed reminding that Thorpe was not an isolated anomaly but part of a long history of Indigenous athletes competing at the highest levels of international sport.<\/p>\n
The combination of family advocacy, scholarly research, political pressure, and the involvement of the families of the athletes who had been elevated in Thorpe’s place eventually produced the 2022 decision.<\/p>\n
It is difficult to say which element was most essential.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The more accurate statement is that all of them were necessary \u2014 that the correction required every piece of that combination to come together in the right sequence.<\/p>\n
What Cannot Be Said With Certainty \u2014 And Why That Matters<\/p>\n
The story of Jim Thorpe is one in which the temptation to simplify is constant and understandable.<\/p>\n
The simplified version is clean: a great Native American athlete won two gold medals, was robbed of them by institutional racism, and eventually had them restored.<\/p>\n
That version is emotionally satisfying and largely directionally accurate.<\/p>\n
It is not, however, quite precise enough to be fully true.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 1913 disqualification was the application of a real rule that genuinely prohibited what Thorpe had done.<\/p>\n
The rule was applied outside its own time limit, which was a procedural violation that should have prevented the disqualification.<\/p>\n
The rule was also applied in an environment where the same conduct by other athletes was protected by a convention that Thorpe did not know about and had not been taught.<\/p>\n
Whether specific individuals in the AAU or at Carlisle chose not to warn Thorpe because he was Native, or because they were focused on other things, or because they assumed the time limit would protect him, is not clearly established in the documentary record.<\/p>\n
What is clearly established is that the disqualification was procedurally improper.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The protest was filed after the deadline.<\/p>\n
The IOC’s own eventual admission \u2014 that the award to Thorpe was being restored because the protest had come outside the rules \u2014 confirms this.<\/p>\n
The disqualification was not simply harsh; it was not correctly executed under the rules that governed the Games.<\/p>\n
The racial context of 1913 America \u2014 the specific position of Native Americans in American society, the specific implications of having come through a boarding school system designed to eliminate Native identity, the specific vulnerabilities of someone who did not know the rules he was supposed to navigate \u2014 provides essential context for understanding why the disqualification happened and why it was sustained for as long as it was.<\/p>\n
It does not simplify that context into a documented causal claim that specific individuals acted with racial motivation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The honest account is the more complex one: a rule was misapplied to an athlete who did not know about a convention that would have protected him, in an environment structured by assumptions that disadvantaged people in exactly his position, and the misapplication was maintained for more than a century by institutional inertia and by the specific resistance of the most powerful individual in amateur sport.<\/p>\n
That is not a less damning account than the simplified one.<\/p>\n
It is a more accurate one, and accuracy matters because the accurate account points to the structural features of the system rather than to individual villainy that can be contained by assigning blame and moving on.<\/p>\n
The Question The Medals Could Not Answer<\/p>\n
Toward the end of his life, Jim Thorpe gave an interview in which he was asked about the medals.<\/p>\n
He gave the answer that his daughter Grace would later pass down: “I won ’em, and I know I won ’em.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The statement is more interesting than it first appears.<\/p>\n
It is not a claim about the IOC’s official record.<\/p>\n
It is not a claim about justice or injustice.<\/p>\n
It is a claim about knowledge \u2014 about the specific relationship between a person and what they have done, independent of what the institutions around them say about it.<\/p>\n
Thorpe knew he had won.<\/p>\n
He had crossed the finish lines, had cleared the bars, had thrown the implements, had done it all faster and further and higher than everyone else in the stadium.<\/p>\n
That knowledge was not subject to revision by the AAU or the IOC or any newspaper editorial.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The score existed in the world whether it existed in the record books or not.<\/p>\n
The institutions caught up to that knowledge, eventually.<\/p>\n
They caught up slowly, and partially, and then more fully, and finally in 2022 the official record said what the performance in Stockholm had said in July 1912.<\/p>\n
Whether that correction fully addresses what the original disqualification cost \u2014 whether it addresses what was taken from Thorpe when he was alive, when his children were growing up, when his grandchildren were forming their understanding of their family history \u2014 is a question that the institutions cannot answer.<\/p>\n
The record correction is real and meaningful.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is also, necessarily, incomplete.<\/p>\n
It addresses the documentary wrong without addressing the lived experience of the wrong.<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe is in the record as the sole champion of the 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon.<\/p>\n
His world record score in the decathlon \u2014 8,412 points on July 15, 1912 \u2014 is part of the official history of the event.<\/p>\n
He was, on the day he set it, the greatest all-around athlete in the world.<\/p>\n
He was also, on that day, a citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation competing for a country that would not grant him citizenship for another twelve years, carrying forward from a boarding school designed to eliminate his identity the specific gifts that allowed him to be exactly what the Swedish king told him he was.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The medals are a record of one afternoon, and a few more days, in Stockholm.<\/p>\n
The man behind them was considerably more.<\/p>\n
He told his daughter he knew he’d won.<\/p>\n
She spent her life making sure the world eventually had to agree.<\/p>\n
The Competitors Who Stayed In Second Place<\/p>\n
One of the most humanly interesting dimensions of the Thorpe story involves the athletes who were elevated in 1913 to the positions Thorpe had vacated, and what their own relationship to those positions turned out to be.<\/p>\n
Hugo Wieslander was a genuine athlete and a genuine competitor.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had prepared extensively for the 1912 decathlon.<\/p>\n
He was the Swedish favorite entering the Games.<\/p>\n
He finished second to Thorpe by 688 points, which represents a performance gap that, in decathlon terms, is substantial.<\/p>\n
He competed well.<\/p>\n
He simply competed against someone who was better.<\/p>\n
When the IOC presented Wieslander with the gold medal that had been stripped from Thorpe, he reportedly refused it.<\/p>\n
Whether this occurred exactly as described, or whether the family’s later characterization of his views involves some retrospective shaping, cannot be confirmed from this distance.<\/p>\n
What the family confirmed to the IOC in 2022 is that Wieslander considered Thorpe the rightful champion, and had held that view throughout his life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Swedish Olympic Committee’s enthusiastic participation in the 2022 reinstatement was consistent with this history.<\/p>\n
Ferdinand Bie of Norway, who finished second in the pentathlon and was elevated to first place, had a similar documented orientation.<\/p>\n
The Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports consulted with Bie’s family in 2022, and their response enabled the IOC to proceed with the reinstatement.<\/p>\n
There is something quietly important about this dimension of the story.<\/p>\n
The athletes who were given Thorpe’s titles did not seek them.<\/p>\n
The titles were assigned to them by an institutional decision they had not requested.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And they, and their families after them, apparently understood that the assignment was not legitimate \u2014 that they were holders of records that properly belonged to someone else.<\/p>\n
The fact that both families were willing, decades later, to consent to the correction \u2014 indeed, that the families of both men appear to have wanted the correction for reasons that reflected their predecessors’ own views \u2014 suggests that the institutional wrong was visible from multiple directions.<\/p>\n
It was not merely a complaint from the Thorpe family.<\/p>\n
It was an error that the athletes who nominally benefited from it also recognized as an error.<\/p>\n
The 2022 reinstatement was, in this sense, an exercise in institutional correction that was supported by essentially everyone directly involved: the Thorpe family, the Wieslander family, the Bie family, the Swedish Olympic Committee, the Norwegian Olympic Committee, and the IOC itself.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The opponents of reinstatement were not the athletes or their descendants.<\/p>\n
They were the institutional habits of an organization that had been slow to revisit what it had done.<\/p>\n
The Pro Football Hall Of Fame And What It Captured<\/p>\n
In 1963, the Pro Football Hall of Fame opened in Canton, Ohio \u2014 specifically in Canton because the Canton Bulldogs had been the team around which Jim Thorpe had helped build professional football into something resembling its modern form.<\/p>\n
Thorpe was inducted in the inaugural class.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Hall of Fame class of 1963 included seventeen players and three coaches who had defined the sport in its early decades, and Thorpe’s inclusion was not controversial.<\/p>\n
His football career had been too long and too dominant for it to be otherwise.<\/p>\n
The Hall of Fame was doing something the Olympic record would not do for another six decades: recognizing the full scope of what Thorpe had accomplished.<\/p>\n
It was putting his name in a place where the record of his achievements was preserved and celebrated without the asterisk that the Olympic disqualification had created.<\/p>\n
The College Football Hall of Fame would follow.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The various athletic honors that accumulated across the decades of the postwar period \u2014 most significant among them the Associated Press designation as the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century, voted in 1950 when Thorpe was still alive \u2014 created a cumulative record of recognition that coexisted, uncomfortably and absurdly, with the official Olympic record that still listed him only as a co-champion.<\/p>\n
By the time the 2022 reinstatement was announced, Thorpe had been recognized by virtually every athletic institution in the United States in the most comprehensive terms available.<\/p>\n
He was a Hall of Famer.<\/p>\n
He was the AP’s greatest athlete.<\/p>\n
He was on a Wheaties box, finally, after the letter-writing campaign of 2001 that forced that particular institution to acknowledge what it had overlooked for fifty years.<\/p>\n
The IOC was, in 2022, the last major institution to bring its formal record into alignment with what virtually everyone else had already concluded: that Jim Thorpe had won two gold medals in Stockholm in 1912, that no one else had won them, and that the man to whom history and justice assigned them was the same man who stood on the track that July afternoon and made it impossible to give them to anyone else.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The World Record That Stood For Decades And What It Means<\/p>\n
When considering the full picture of Jim Thorpe’s Olympic achievement, the world record in the decathlon deserves particular attention \u2014 not because records are the only measure of athletic significance, but because this specific record illuminates the scale of what was removed from the historical account.<\/p>\n
The 8,412 points Thorpe scored in the 1912 decathlon, calculated under the scoring system of that era, represented a performance that would not be matched until 1948.<\/p>\n
This is worth absorbing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thorpe won the decathlon in 1912.<\/p>\n
The next athlete to exceed his score did so thirty-six years later, in 1948.<\/p>\n
In the interim, the world had seen the entire span of events between two world wars, the expansion of systematic athletic training, the development of modern sports science, the global spread of competitive athletics, and the competition of tens of thousands of athletes across dozens of countries.<\/p>\n
None of it, until 1948, was enough to beat what Thorpe had done in Stockholm without specialized decathlon training, without having competed in the event before, and while carrying the full weight of everything else he was \u2014 the Carlisle student, the minor league baseball player, the person who would have his titles stripped six months later.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 1,500-meter closing run of his decathlon \u2014 the most demanding event psychologically and physically, the event that is often decisive in closely contested competitions \u2014 he completed in four minutes and 40.1 seconds.<\/p>\n
No decathlete would run faster until 1972.<\/p>\n
Athletes who came to the event specifically trained for it, who had coaches and nutritionists and periodization plans and all the tools that modern athletics provides, could not match it for twenty years.<\/p>\n
These are not ordinary athletic achievements.<\/p>\n
They are the kind of achievements that force you to confront the question of what athletic genius actually looks like when it encounters conditions that allow it full expression.<\/p>\n
The record that stood from 1912 to 1948 was not in the official books for most of that period.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The name that should have headed the results was absent.<\/p>\n
The absent name was Wa-Tho-Huk \u2014 Bright Path \u2014 and the absence was the specific, documented consequence of a procedural error made by an institution that violated its own rules.<\/p>\n
The record is in the books now.<\/p>\n
The name is there.<\/p>\n
The correction took longer than it should have, and it could not repair what the long delay cost.<\/p>\n
But the score is there: 8,412 points, July 15, 1912, Stockholm.<\/p>\n
It belongs to Jim Thorpe.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It always did.<\/p>\n
The Legacy That Outlasted The Institutions That Failed Him<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe died in 1953 without his Olympic titles.<\/p>\n
He died having been voted the greatest athlete of the half-century, without the specific recognition that the two gold medals should have represented.<\/p>\n
He died in financial difficulty, in a house in Lomita, California, far from the Oklahoma land where he had been born and far from the stadium in Stockholm where the world had briefly understood, as clearly as athletic competition allows, what he was capable of.<\/p>\n
The distance between those two things \u2014 the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century, dying in poverty with his Olympic titles stripped from the record \u2014 is the specific shape of what the disqualification cost him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Not merely the medals, which were objects.<\/p>\n
Not merely the scores, which were numbers.<\/p>\n
But the formal recognition, across the decades of his life and afterward, that what he had done in Stockholm was what it was.<\/p>\n
His children carried the campaign forward.<\/p>\n
His daughter Grace, particularly, devoted years to the effort.<\/p>\n
The scholars and biographers who documented his life \u2014 Robert Wheeler most significantly \u2014 did the archival work that gave the effort its legal and procedural foundation.<\/p>\n
The political advocates who pushed the IOC from inside and outside contributed to the environment that made the 1982 decision possible.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Bright Path Strong organization and Billy Mills and the families of Wieslander and Bie made the 2022 decision possible.<\/p>\n
The correction required all of them.<\/p>\n
It required multiple generations and multiple kinds of effort across more than a century.<\/p>\n
What it produced, in 2022, was a line in the official Olympic record: James Francis Thorpe, Sac and Fox Nation, gold medal, pentathlon and decathlon, Stockholm 1912.<\/p>\n
The line should always have been there.<\/p>\n
It is there now.<\/p>\n
And the story of how long it took to get there \u2014 the procedural violation, the institutional inertia, the partial reinstatement, the forty more years to complete it \u2014 is as much a part of the historical record as the score itself.<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe told his daughter he knew he’d won.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was right.<\/p>\n
The record finally says so.<\/p>\n
The path was bright, and long, and it arrived where it should have arrived a long time ago.<\/p>\n
The Ticker-Tape Parade And What It Obscured<\/p>\n
When the American Olympic team returned from Stockholm in August 1912, New York City gave them a ticker-tape parade down Broadway.<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe was at the center of it.<\/p>\n
The city’s newspapers covered the event with the enthusiastic language of athletic triumph, and Thorpe was the figure around whom the celebration organized itself.<\/p>\n
He was, in that August, what American celebrity makes of athletic achievement: a name on front pages, a face in photographs, the object of public fascination and the target of journalists who wanted to explain his gifts to readers who had not been in Stockholm to see them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The parade and the coverage were genuine celebrations of genuine achievement.<\/p>\n
They were also, in the specific American context of 1912, something else: the absorption of a Sac and Fox man’s athletic performance into a national narrative that did not particularly account for who he was or where he came from.<\/p>\n
He was celebrated as an American athlete, as the nation’s greatest Olympian, as the proof that American training and American character could produce the best athletes in the world.<\/p>\n
The specific character of the person being celebrated \u2014 the citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation, the graduate of a boarding school designed to replace his Native identity with something more convenient, the young man who had not known that playing baseball under his own name would cost him everything the parade was celebrating \u2014 was not the center of the story as the newspapers told it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This absorption was not malicious in the simple sense.<\/p>\n
The newspapers that celebrated Thorpe were, for the most part, doing what American journalism did with athletic celebrity: they were making him legible to a general audience by fitting him into available frameworks.<\/p>\n
The framework available for a great American athlete was not the framework of a Sac and Fox man navigating the specific conditions of early twentieth-century Native American life.<\/p>\n
It was the framework of the heroic American competitor, individual achievement in the service of national pride.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The distance between those frameworks \u2014 between who Thorpe actually was and how American celebrity processed him \u2014 was not merely a problem of journalism.<\/p>\n
It was a structural feature of the relationship between Native America and the American mainstream that has characterized most of their encounters.<\/p>\n
The mainstream encounters something from Native communities that is remarkable or powerful, absorbs it into its own narrative structures, and thereby misses the specific thing that makes it what it actually is.<\/p>\n
Thorpe, in 1912, was celebrated for his achievement while being understood primarily through categories that did not include the most important things about him.<\/p>\n
The disqualification, when it came, processed him through the same categories: the rule-violator, the professional athlete who had cheated.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific context \u2014 the boarding school, the lack of knowledge about the rule, the minor league wages, the procedural violations in applying the rule \u2014 was not the center of that story either.<\/p>\n
Understanding both of these things \u2014 the celebration and the disqualification \u2014 requires understanding who Thorpe actually was, in the specific terms that his life provides rather than in the convenient abstractions that American celebrity offered.<\/p>\n
The Specific Sums Of Money That Triggered Everything<\/p>\n
One of the most useful things to understand about the amateurism controversy is exactly what Thorpe was paid for playing baseball, because the specificity makes the punishment legible in a way that the abstract term “professional athlete” does not.<\/p>\n
The figures vary across sources, as figures from this period tend to, but the general picture is consistent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thorpe played minor league baseball in the Eastern Carolina League in 1909 and 1910.<\/p>\n
He played for the Rocky Mount Railroaders and then for Fayetteville.<\/p>\n
He was paid somewhere in the range of $2 per game at the lower end of estimates to $60 per month or $25 per week at the higher end, depending on the year and the source.<\/p>\n
The SABR biography of Thorpe cites $60 per month for the period he played.<\/p>\n
Whatever the precise figure, the scale is clear: this was payment at the lowest levels of organized professional baseball, in a Class D minor league, for a small number of games played in two summers before his Olympic training had even begun.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was not the compensation of a professional athlete in any meaningful contemporary sense.<\/p>\n
It was the kind of wage-earning that someone from a modest background in early twentieth-century America would do when opportunity presented itself.<\/p>\n
The contrast between this sum and the $6,000 per season \u2014 the most ever paid to a major league rookie \u2014 that the New York Giants paid Thorpe immediately after his disqualification is one of the more revealing ironies in the story.<\/p>\n
The minor league payments that cost him his Olympic titles were dwarfed by what the major leagues were immediately willing to pay once those titles were gone.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The professional value of Jim Thorpe as an athlete was not even slightly obscured by what had happened in 1913.<\/p>\n
Everyone understood that he was worth paying for.<\/p>\n
The amateurism rule, when viewed from this angle, was not primarily a rule about the relationship between money and athletic integrity.<\/p>\n
It was a rule about the maintenance of a fiction \u2014 the fiction that Olympic athletes competed without financial considerations, a fiction that protected wealthy athletes who could afford to maintain it and exposed athletes who could not.<\/p>\n
Thorpe could not afford to maintain it, in part because he did not know he was supposed to.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The minor league wages he earned were not a substantial sum.<\/p>\n
They were not the proceeds of a professional athletic career in any mature sense.<\/p>\n
They were what a young man from an economically insecure background earned when he could, in the years before he understood that those earnings would someday be used against him.<\/p>\n
The 1912 Decathlon Over Ten Events \u2014 What He Actually Did<\/p>\n
The men’s decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics consisted of ten events spread over three days: the 100 meters, the long jump, the shot put, the high jump, and the 400 meters on the first day; the 110-meter hurdles, the discus throw, the pole vault, the javelin throw, and the 1,500 meters on the second and third days.<\/p>\n
The scoring system used in 1912 was different from the one used today, so precise comparisons across eras require caution.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the relative performance within the 1912 competition is directly comparable.<\/p>\n
The margin between Thorpe and Wieslander \u2014 688 points in the final scoring \u2014 represented a decisive gap across all ten disciplines.<\/p>\n
Thorpe did not win every event in the decathlon.<\/p>\n
In a ten-event competition across three days against the best multi-event athletes assembled from across the competitive world, winning every single event would have been extraordinary even for him.<\/p>\n
What he did was accumulate a lead in the early events, maintain it consistently, and produce the best overall performance across the full range of physical demands the decathlon presents.<\/p>\n
His long jump was the best in the competition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His shot put was the best.<\/p>\n
His high jump tied for the best.<\/p>\n
His 1,500 meters at the end of three days of competition \u2014 the event that reveals who has conserved energy wisely and who has exhausted it \u2014 was his fastest and the competition’s best.<\/p>\n
The pentathlon, held a week earlier, was five events in a single day: the long jump, the javelin throw, the 200 meters, the discus throw, and the 1,500 meters.<\/p>\n
Thorpe won four of the five events.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He finished second in the javelin.<\/p>\n
The final score placed him so far ahead of the field that the competition was effectively over before the final event was run.<\/p>\n
The specific events and the specific performances are in the record now.<\/p>\n
They belong there.<\/p>\n
The athlete who produced them \u2014 who had never competed in a decathlon before Stockholm, who trained for these events alongside a football career and a baseball practice regimen \u2014 is in the record as their author.<\/p>\n
It took a hundred and ten years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Sixty-Nine Years Between Thorpe’s Death And Full Justice<\/p>\n
Jim Thorpe died on March 28, 1953.<\/p>\n
The full reinstatement of his Olympic titles \u2014 his recognition as the sole champion of both the pentathlon and the decathlon \u2014 came on July 15, 2022.<\/p>\n
The gap between those two dates is sixty-nine years.<\/p>\n
In those sixty-nine years, the world had changed in ways that would have been unimaginable to the people in that 1913 IOC meeting room where the vote to strip his titles was taken.<\/p>\n
The Olympic Games had grown from a modest gathering of male athletes from a handful of countries into a global event encompassing hundreds of nations and thousands of athletes across dozens of sports.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The amateurism rules that had been used to disqualify Thorpe had themselves been largely abandoned \u2014 the IOC moved away from strict amateurism over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, and professional athletes now compete in most Olympic sports.<\/p>\n
The country that Thorpe had competed for \u2014 still not fully granting citizenship to Native Americans in 1912 \u2014 had passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, had established the Indian Claims Commission, had passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, and had moved, haltingly and imperfectly, toward a more complex and more accurate relationship with its Indigenous citizens.<\/p>\n
The AAU, which had stripped Thorpe’s amateur status in 1913, had restored it in 1973.<\/p>\n
The same AAU had been largely sidelined as a governance body for American Olympic athletics by the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, the legislation that created the United States Olympic Committee in its modern form.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Across all of this transformation, the official Olympic record had remained wrong.<\/p>\n
The co-championship designation of 1982 had been better than the erasure that preceded it, but it had not been right.<\/p>\n
The correction, when it finally came in 2022, was acknowledged by the IOC as exceptional \u2014 as something outside the normal course of institutional action.<\/p>\n
What it was, more precisely, was the completion of something that should have been done at least forty years earlier, and arguably should never have required completion because the 1913 decision should never have been made in the first place.<\/p>\n
The sixty-nine years between death and justice is not, in the history of wrongs against Native Americans, an unusually long time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is, in fact, rather typical of how long institutional corrections take when the people most directly harmed by the wrong are not positioned to compel immediate redress.<\/p>\n
It required sustained advocacy across generations.<\/p>\n
It required the alignment of the right people at the right institutional moment.<\/p>\n
It required the consent of the families of athletes in Norway and Sweden who had always known that what the IOC had given their predecessors was not legitimately theirs.<\/p>\n
All of those things came together in July 2022.<\/p>\n
The record was corrected.<\/p>\n
Why This Story Became Larger Than Two Medals<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The question that Thorpe’s story poses \u2014 the one that makes it larger than a dispute about athletic eligibility \u2014 is the question of what institutions owe to the people they have wronged and how they discharge that obligation.<\/p>\n
The IOC wronged Thorpe in 1913 by applying its own rules incorrectly, accepting a protest filed outside the established deadline and stripping a man of titles he had legitimately earned.<\/p>\n
The error was documented.<\/p>\n
It was eventually acknowledged.<\/p>\n
The remedy was provided in stages, across decades, until the correction was finally complete.<\/p>\n
What the correction cannot provide is the experience of having been recognized correctly from the beginning.<\/p>\n
It cannot restore the years of Thorpe’s life that he lived with his titles stripped.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It cannot restore the years of his children’s lives during which the Olympic record said something false about their father.<\/p>\n
It cannot make Grace Thorpe’s decades of advocacy something that was unnecessary.<\/p>\n
The institutional correction is real, and it matters.<\/p>\n
It matters to Thorpe’s grandchildren, who can now see the official record say what their grandfather always said \u2014 that he won.<\/p>\n
It matters to the Sac and Fox Nation and to the broader Native American community for whom Thorpe’s story is a significant part of a larger history of representation and recognition.<\/p>\n
It matters to the integrity of the Olympic historical record, which is more accurate now than it was before July 2022.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What it cannot do is close the gap between what should have happened in 1913 and what actually happened, and what should have happened in 1982 and what actually happened then too.<\/p>\n
Those gaps are permanent features of the historical record.<\/p>\n
They document not just what was done to Thorpe but how slowly and incompletely the correction was made.<\/p>\n
The story is now, officially, what it should have been all along: Jim Thorpe won two gold medals in Stockholm in 1912.<\/p>\n
He was the greatest all-around athlete of his era, and one of the greatest of any era.<\/p>\n
He was a citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation who competed for a country that had not yet made him its citizen.<\/p>\n
He was stripped of his titles by an institution that violated its own rules.<\/p>\n
He was partially recognized seven decades after the fact, and fully recognized a century and ten years after the fact.<\/p>\n
He told his daughter he knew he’d won.<\/p>\n
History, eventually, had to agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Stockholm, July 1912 The crowd at the Olympic stadium in Stockholm had been watching athletics for six days…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1445,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443\/revisions\/1445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}