Solid Gold

On October 13th, 1982, the International Olympic Committee approved the petition for the posthumous reinstatement of Jim Thorpe’s Olympic titles. In January of 1983, two of Thorpe’s children were given commemorative medals marking their father's victory in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics.

Half Native-American and born into the Sac and Fox nation in Oklahoma, Jim Thorpe (Indian name – Wa-Tho-Huk) was certainly the best all-around athlete of the 20th century, a superstar football player and a great lacrosse player who went on to win two gold medals at the Olympics without even trying very hard (or training) before moving on to careers in major league baseball and pro football and basketball. Which is another way of saying that Bo didn't know jack shit.

The pentathlon and decathlon were both new events at the Stockholm Olympics, and Thorpe, at that point the best college football player in the nation, was new to track and field entirely. He’d participated in one pentathlon before the Games, and the Olympic decathlon would be the first of his life.



Nevertheless, he annihilated the competition. The only event in the pentathlon that he did not win outright was the javelin throw, which he’d done maybe three times in his life. In the decathlon, he defeated the odds-on favorite, Hugo Wieslander, by more than 700 points. King Gustav of Sweden declared him “the greatest athlete in the world.” He became a huge star in the States and received a ticker tape parade on Broadway.

The next year, the Olympic Committee began enforcing strict rules concerning amateurism at the Games, stripping the medals of any athletes who had received money for participation in sport prior to their Olympic appearances. It was discovered that Thorpe had played two seasons of semi-pro baseball in 1909 and 1910, and so he lost his medals, which was some shit, because those medals were solid gold, the last of their kind. After Stockholm, Olympic medals would become the gold-plated trinkets they are today.


The rules concerning amateurism had not been in place prior to the Stockholm Games, and thus were completely bogus. Thorpe died in 1953, penniless and largely forgotten. In 1982, his surviving children established the Jim Thorpe Foundation to reinstate Thorpe’s Olympic victories, and on this day 24 years ago, they got their wish. Sadly, they did not receive his original medals. Those suckers, worth their weight in gold, had long since disappeared. They got a couple of cheapass replicas instead, which is typical.