Jim Thorpe

• 1. Introduction

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  Jim Thorpe walked past a high jump pit one day at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, still wearing his street clothes, and leaped 5 feet 9 inches , clearing the school record without a single warmup. That impromptu jump in 1907 was a signal of something extraordinary: a man who seemed to break records almost by accident. Born James Francis Thorpe on the 22nd or the 28th of May, 1887, in Indian Territory that would later become Oklahoma, he grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation with the Sauk name Wa-Tho-Huk, meaning "Bright path the lightning makes as it goes across the sky." By the time he died on the 28th of March, 1953, he had won two Olympic gold medals, played professional baseball, football, and basketball, and been called the greatest athlete in the world by a king. Yet the arc of his life contained grief and injustice in equal measure to its triumphs. Who was this man , and why did the world both celebrate and betray him?

• 2. The Making of an Athlete

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  Thorpe's early years were shaped by loss. His twin brother Charlie died of pneumonia when both boys were nine, and Thorpe ran away from school more than once after that. His father Hiram, who was part Irish and part Sac and Fox, sent him to the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, to prevent further escapes. Then his mother Charlotte died from childbirth complications. Then, in 1904, Hiram died from gangrene poisoning after a hunting accident, leaving the 16-year-old Thorpe an orphan. He had already returned to Carlisle by that point, and grief apparently sharpened rather than dulled him.

  Pop Warner, one of the most influential coaches in early American football history, noticed Thorpe at Carlisle and became his coach. Warner initially feared Thorpe would injure himself in such a physical game as football. He gave the young man a chance to try some rushing plays in practice against the school team's defense, fully expecting him to quit. Thorpe ran through the entire defense, then ran through it again. He walked back to Warner and said, "Nobody is going to tackle Jim," and flipped him the ball.

  Thorpe also competed in football, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, boxing, handball, and even won the 1912 intercollegiate ballroom dancing championship. He made his college football debut on the 22nd of September, 1907, against Lebanon Valley, coming off the bench to score two touchdowns in a 40-0 victory. By 1911, he was good enough to score all of his team's four field goals in an 18-15 upset of Harvard, a top-ranked team, while rushing for 173 yards in the same game. Carlisle finished that year with an 11-1 record and was later named a national collegiate champion.

  The poet Marianne Moore, who taught Thorpe at Carlisle, described something that statistics alone cannot capture: "He had a kind of ease in his gait that is hard to describe. Equilibrium with no stricture, but couched in the lineup of football he was the epitome of concentration, wary, with an effect of plenty in reserve."

• 3. Stockholm 1912

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  The 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm introduced two multi-event disciplines that would become the pentathlon and the decathlon. Thorpe was so versatile at Carlisle that he had served as a one-man team in several track meets. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he could run the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds flat, high-jump 6 feet 5 inches, pole vault 11 feet, and throw the javelin 163 feet. He earned his place on the Olympic team at the Celtic Park trials in New York, where his all-round ability stood out across every event.

  At the Olympics, Thorpe competed in the pentathlon on the 7th of July. He won four of the five events, placing third only in the javelin, which was an event he had not competed in before 1912. He won the gold medal. That same day he qualified for the high jump final, where he tied for fourth. On the 12th of July he placed seventh in the long jump. Then came the decathlon.

  Strong competition from the local favorite Hugo Wieslander was expected. Thorpe defeated Wieslander by 688 points, placing in the top four in all ten events. His Olympic record of 8,413 points stood for nearly two decades. What made the performance even more remarkable was a theft: someone stole Thorpe's shoes just before the decathlon. He found a mismatched pair of replacements, one of them from a trash can, and won the gold medal wearing them.

  King Gustav V of Sweden personally presented Thorpe with his prizes during the closing ceremonies, along with challenge trophies donated by the King and by Czar Nicholas II of Russia. The exchange that followed has entered sporting legend. Several sources record that Gustav told Thorpe, "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world," to which Thorpe replied, "Thanks, King." Thorpe biographer Kate Buford, however, notes that the reply did not appear in newspapers until 1948 and believes that such a response "would have been out of character for a man who was highly uncomfortable in public ceremonies and hated to stand out."

  On the Olympic team's return to the United States, Thorpe was the star of a ticker-tape parade on Broadway. He recalled later: "I heard people yelling my name, and I couldn't realize how one fellow could have so many friends."

• 4. Stripped of Gold

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  In late January 1913, the Worcester Telegram reported that Thorpe had played semi-professional baseball in the Eastern Carolina League for Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1909 and 1910. He had reportedly been paid as little as two dollars per game and as much as thirty-five dollars per week. Under the strict amateurism rules of the 1912 Olympics, accepting any money for athletic competition made a person ineligible. Thorpe had used his own name rather than an alias, as most college players who did the same thing were careful to do.

  Thorpe wrote a letter to the Amateur Athletic Union's secretary, James Edward Sullivan, acknowledging what he had done. "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 fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong, because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they did not use their own names." The letter did not help. The AAU withdrew his amateur status retroactively, and the IOC unanimously voted to strip him of his Olympic titles, medals, and awards.

  The silver medalist Hugo Wieslander, awarded the gold in Thorpe's place, refused to accept it. He believed Thorpe was the legitimate champion. And there was a procedural problem: the rulebook for the 1912 Olympics required that protests be filed within 30 days of the closing ceremonies. The first newspaper reports did not appear until January 1913, roughly six months after the Stockholm Games had ended. There is also evidence the AAU had known of Thorpe's semi-professional background before the Olympics and had simply ignored it.

  The only immediate benefit for Thorpe was that professional sports clubs began sending him offers the moment the news broke. He signed with the New York Giants baseball club in 1913.

• 5. A Professional in Three Sports

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  Thorpe's professional baseball career with the New York Giants began in 1913, the year the club were defending National League champions. He played sporadically as an outfielder. In one celebrated game, the "double no-hitter" between Fred Toney of the Reds and Hippo Vaughn of the Chicago Cubs, Thorpe drove in the winning run in the 10th inning. His career batting average over 289 major league games was .252, with 91 runs scored and 82 runs batted in. He also joined the Giants on a world barnstorming tour, where he met Pope Pius X, played before 20,000 spectators in London including King George V, and met Abbas II Hilmi Bey, the last Khedive of Egypt.

  Football, though, was Thorpe's favorite sport. He signed with the Canton Bulldogs in 1915 at $250 a game, a large wage at the time. The Bulldogs averaged 1,200 fans per game before he arrived. 8,000 showed up for his debut against the Massillon Tigers. Canton won titles in 1916, 1917, and 1919. In the 1919 championship game, Thorpe reportedly ended the contest by kicking a wind-assisted 95-yard punt from his team's own 5-yard line.

  In 1920, he became the nominal first president of the American Professional Football Association, which became the NFL two years later. He spent most of that year playing for Canton rather than administering the organization, and was replaced as president by Joseph Carr a year later. Between 1921 and 1923, he helped organize the Oorang Indians of La Rue, Ohio, an all-Native American team, and was selected for the Green Bay Press-Gazette first All-NFL team in 1923. He retired from professional football at age 41 after playing 52 games for six teams.

  Thorpe also had a basketball career that remained almost entirely unknown to historians until 2005, when a ticket documenting his participation was discovered in an old book. By 1926 he was the main feature of the World Famous Indians of La Rue, Ohio, a traveling team that barnstormed multiple states for at least two years.

• 6. Race and Recognition

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  Thorpe accomplished every one of his athletic feats within a country that did not extend full citizenship to all Native Americans until 1924. At the time he won his Olympic gold medals, many Native people were denied recognition as U.S. citizens unless they adopted European-American customs. The first mention of Thorpe in The New York Times was headlined: "Indian Thorpe in Olympiad; Redskin from Carlisle Will Strive for Place on American Team." Throughout his career, sportswriters consistently framed his achievements in racial terms, treating sporting competitions as conflicts between Indians and whites.

  When Thorpe attended Carlisle, the school used its students' ethnicity as a marketing tool. It has often been suggested that Thorpe's Olympic medals were stripped, at least in part, because of his ethnicity. While that claim is difficult to prove outright, public comment at the time largely reflected that view.

  After his athletic career ended, Thorpe struggled to earn a consistent living. During the Great Depression he worked as a movie extra, mostly playing American Indian characters in Westerns. In 1931 he sold the film rights to his life story to MGM for $1,500. Warner Bros. eventually acquired those rights and released Jim Thorpe - All-American in 1951, starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Michael Curtiz. Thorpe received $15,000 from Warner Bros. for that film, plus a $2,500 donation toward an annuity.

  When Thorpe was hospitalized for lip cancer in 1950 and admitted as a charity case, his wife Patricia told a press conference: "We're broke. Jim has nothing but his name and his memories. He has spent money on his own people and has given it away. He has often been exploited."

  In 1950, just three years before his death, an Associated Press poll of nearly 400 sportswriters and broadcasters voted Thorpe the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century. He died on the 28th of March, 1953, of heart failure at his home in Lomita, California, at the age of 65.

• 7. The Long Road Back

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  Restoring Thorpe's Olympic titles took decades of sustained effort. Author Robert Wheeler and his wife Florence Ridlon were among the most persistent advocates. They succeeded in having the AAU and the United States Olympic Committee restore Thorpe's amateur status. In 1982, Wheeler and Ridlon established the Jim Thorpe Foundation and secured support from the U.S. Congress. Armed with evidence that Thorpe's disqualification had occurred after the 30-day protest period allowed under Olympic rules, they brought their case to the IOC. The IOC Executive Committee approved Thorpe's reinstatement in October 1982.

  The ruling was unusual. Rather than simply restoring Thorpe, the IOC declared him co-champion alongside Ferdinand Bie (pentathlon) and Hugo Wieslander (decathlon). Both athletes had always maintained that Thorpe was the only true champion. On the 18th of January, 1983, the IOC presented two of Thorpe's children, Gale and Bill, with commemorative medals. Thorpe's original medals had been held in museums but were stolen and never recovered.

  The status of co-champion stood for nearly four more decades. In July 2020, a petition from Bright Path Strong began circulating, calling on the IOC to name Thorpe the sole winner. It was supported by Olympian Billy Mills, who had won the 10,000 meters gold at the 1964 Tokyo Games. After the National Olympic Committees of Norway and Sweden, representing Bie and Wieslander, gave their approval, the IOC voted on the 14th of July, 2022, to restore Thorpe as the sole champion in both events , 110 years after he had actually won them.

  President Joe Biden announced in 2024 that Thorpe would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. The Sac and Fox Nation added Olympic rings to their official flag in his honor.

• 8. A Disputed Resting Place

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  Jim Thorpe died in Lomita, California, and was initially meant to be buried in the Garden Grove Cemetery in Oklahoma. A committee raised $2,500 to transport his body back to Shawnee, and on the 12th of April, 1953, Sac and Fox Thunder clan members gathered on a farm in Oklahoma to carry out a traditional Sac burial ceremony. Thorpe's third wife Patricia then arrived, accompanied by law enforcement, and had the body removed before the ceremony could be completed.

  The following year, in May 1954, Patricia made a private deal with officials from two small Pennsylvania towns, Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, who were looking to attract business. According to Thorpe's son Jack, the deal involved monetary considerations. Thorpe's remains were shipped to Pennsylvania, interred there in 1957, and the two towns merged and renamed themselves Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, in his honor. Thorpe had never visited the place.

  Jack Thorpe filed a federal lawsuit in June 2010, arguing under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that his father's body should be returned to the reservation near the place he was born. Jack died on the 22nd of February, 2011, at age 73, before the case was resolved. In April 2013 a federal district judge ruled that the borough of Jim Thorpe functioned as a museum under the law and was therefore bound by it. That ruling was reversed in October 2014 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. On the 5th of October, 2015, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the matter, closing the legal process.

  Today the monument in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, still bears the words King Gustav V spoke to Thorpe in Stockholm. The grave rests on mounds of soil brought from his native Oklahoma and from the stadium where he won his gold medals , a place he had never been in life.