Advertisement
The seriousness of his infraction has long been debated, as college athletes at the time often played baseball for money but did so under an assumed name. Thorpe, a Native American of the Sac and Fox Nation, was unfamiliar with the practice of using another name and used his own, making it easier for newspapers to track down the infraction.
The decision comes after years of public pressure and advocacy, most recently from the organization Bright Path Strong and Anita DeFrantz, the longtime IOC member. It also comes with the support of the surviving family members of Hugo K. Wieslander, who was named the decathlon champion when Thorpe was stripped of his title, and the Swedish Olympic Committee.
“We welcome that a solution could be found thanks to the great commitment of Bright Path Strong,” said IOC President Thomas Bach in a statement. “This is an extremely extraordinary and unique situation that has been addressed with an extraordinary gesture of fair play by the National Olympic Committees concerned.”
While the IOC often doesn’t change official records, circumstances and pressure from powerful figures like DeFrantz made this decision easier for Olympic leaders.
“Even the athletes themselves (in the decathlon and pentathlon) said, ‘He’s the champion, don’t give us the medal,'” Olympic historian David Wallechinsky said in a phone interview on Friday.
Wallechinsky, whose father, Irving Wallace, ghost-wrote a series of magazine articles with Thorpe not long before Thorpe’s death in 1953, called Thorpe “the greatest athlete of the 20th century.”
In addition to Thorpe’s decathlon and pentathlon victories, he placed fourth in the high jump and seventh in the long jump at the Stockholm Games. He also played Major League Baseball for six years and professional football for another six seasons, where he was running back, end and kicker.
“He was even a master ballroom dancer,” Wallechinsky said.
However, Thorpe’s life was hard, with the Olympic wins being the highlight. He was returning home from Stockholm for a confetti parade on Broadway in New York, a moment that so moved him that he later told Wallace, “I had people calling my name, I couldn’t understand, like a guy.” could have so many friends. ”
In 1913, when news broke that he had broken the amateur rules of the IOC and the Amateur Athletic Union, Thorpe wrote to the AAU, Wallechinsky said, hoping to be “partly exempted because I was in the Indian school”, and was not fastidious about ways to hide the fact that he was playing minor league baseball for money.
Avery Brundage, a dominant leader of American Olympic sport in the mid-20th century and President of the IOC for 20 years, was staunchly opposed to the return of Thorpe’s gold medals. Brundage was known as a strict enforcer of amateur rules but also as a teammate to Thorpe in 1912, who finished sixth in the pentathlon.
In 1982, seven years after Brundage’s death, the IOC presented Thorpe’s family with replica gold medals but refused to change the record, listing him as a co-winner of the events until Friday.
Over the years, critics have urged the IOC to make Thorpe the sole victor. An online petition to set the record straight garnered over 75,000 signatures. In 2021, DeFrantz wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the 1913 decision was not only “one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in sports history,” but also “a stinging episode of early 20th-century bigotry.”
“We welcome this news and are very pleased to honor Jim Thorpe, a major Olympic champion, on the anniversary of his incredible achievement,” said Sarah Hirshland, executive director of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, in a statement. “We sincerely thank Anita DeFrantz, the Bright Path Strong organization, and everyone who worked tirelessly to bring this solution to fruition.”
The Olympic records now show Thorpe as the sole gold medalist in the pentathlon and decathlon, Wieslander as the silver medalist in the decathlon, and Norway’s Ferdinand Bie as the runner-up in the pentathlon.
