By David Maraniss, Photo: Associated Press, The Washington Post, July 17, 2022
More than a century late but better late than never, the Olympic powers-that-be at long last have restored Jim Thorpe to his deserved place in sports history. The records he set and gold medals he won in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics are official now, his alone, 69 years after he died of a heart attack in a trailer home in Southern California, broke and lonely, if not forgotten.
As a member of the Sac and Fox Nation who grew up in the Indian Territory of what would become Oklahoma, and who burst into athletic stardom at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Thorpe endured more than his share of indignities during his life, before and after he earned the title of “greatest athlete in the world” at the Summer Games in Sweden. But the loss of his records and medals was the one that hurt him most, setting Thorpe and his family and supporters on a long and at times seemingly futile quest for simple justice.
There are those who would argue, as his nemesis Avery Brundage and other Olympic officials did for decades, that rules are rules and Thorpe broke amateur regulations by competing for about 30 bucks a month in the summers of 1909 and 1910 as a baseball player for Rocky Mount and Fayetteville in the Eastern Carolina League.
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