JIM THORPE
(James Francis Thorpe)
He was a great football and track & field star. When he was in college, he had played baseball during the summer recess and was paid $2 a game, a common practice for college athletes who played baseball under an assumed name. Thorpe’s school had no athletes who had done that before, and his experience with formal rules was very limited. There was no one at the Carlyle Indian School who could advise him. Later, that technicality was used to strip him of his amateur titles and medals. Despite that, he was voted as the greatest athlete of the 20th century.
James Francis Thorpe was an American athlete and Olympic gold medalist. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe became the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States. Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics (one in classic pentathlon and the other in decathlon), and played American football (collegiate and professional), professional baseball, and basketball. He lost his Olympic titles after it was found he had been paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus violating the amateurism rules that were then in place. In 1983, 30 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) restored his Olympic medals with replicas after ruling that the decision to strip him of his medals fell outside of the required 30 days, but he is to date listed as co-champion in both the decathlon and pentathlon events according to official IOC records.
