Comment After decades of lobbying by his family and other supporters, Jim Thorpe, widely regarded as one of America’s greatest athletes, would finally be recognized as the only pentathlon and decathlon winner at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. The announcement, made on Friday by the International Olympic Committee, 110 years to the day since Thorpe’s decathlon victory, reverses what many consider to be among the great injustices in sport. The IOC had stripped Thorpe of his gold medals and delisted him as the winner of both events a year after the Stockholm Games because he violated Olympic amateur rules by paying to play minor league baseball games in the summers before the Olympics Races. The seriousness of his offense has long been debated, as college athletes at the time often played baseball for cash, but did so under assumed names. Thorpe, a Native American of the Sac and Fox Nation, was unfamiliar with the practice of using a different name and used his own, making it easy for newspapers to spot the violation. The decision comes after years of public lobbying and advocacy, most recently by Bright Path Strong and longtime IOC member Anita DeFrantz. It also comes with the support of the surviving family members of Hugo K. Wieslander, who was named decathlon champion when Thorpe was stripped, and the Swedish Olympic Committee. “We welcome the fact that, thanks to the great commitment of Bright Path Strong, a solution could be found,” IOC President Thomas Bach said in a statement. “This is an extremely extraordinary and unique situation, which has been dealt with with an outstanding gesture of fair play by the National Olympic Committees concerned.” While the IOC often doesn’t change official records, conditions 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 Walecinski said Friday in a phone interview. Wallechinsky, whose father, Irving Wallace, wrote a series of magazine articles with Thorpe shortly before Thorpe’s death in 1953, called Thorpe “the greatest athlete of the 20th century.” In addition to Thorpe’s victories in the decathlon and pentathlon, he finished fourth in the high jump and seventh in the long jump at the Stockholm Games. He also played six years of major league baseball and another six seasons of professional football where he was a running back, tight end and punter. “He was even a champion ballroom dancer,” Wallechinsky said. Thorpe’s life was tough, however, with the Olympiacos victories being the highlight. He returned home from Stockholm to a tape parade on Broadway in New York, a moment that moved him so much that he later told Wallace: “I had people calling my name, I couldn’t realize how a friend could have so many friends . “ When news broke in 1913 that he had violated the amateur rules of the IOC and the Amateur Athletic Association, Thorpe wrote to the AAU, Wallechinsky said, hoping to be exonerated in part because he was studying in India, and he was uncomplicated about the ways to hide the fact that he played baseball for the money. Avery Brandage, a dominant leader of American Olympic sports in the mid-20th century and president of the IOC for 20 years, strongly opposed the return of Thorpe’s gold medals. Brundage was known as a strict enforcer of the rules of amateurism and was Thorpe’s teammate in 1912, finishing sixth in the pentathlon. In 1982, seven years after Brundage’s death, the IOC presented Thorpe’s family with gold medals but refused to change the record, listing him as co-winner of the events, until Friday. Over the years, critics have called on the IOC to make Thorpe the sole winner. An online petition to correct the record has 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 bitter episode of early 20th-century bigotry.” “We welcome this news and are thrilled to honor Jim Thorpe, a great Olympian on the anniversary of his incredible achievement,” Sarah Hirsland, CEO of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said in a statement. “We offer our sincere thanks to Anita DeFrantz, the Bright Path Strong organization, and everyone who worked tirelessly toward this solution.” The Olympic records will now show Thorpe as the only Olympic gold medalist in the pentathlon and decathlon, Wieslander as the silver medalist in the decathlon and Norway’s Ferdinand B as the second winner in the pentathlon.
