October 13, 1982: Jim Thorpe's medals come back as copies, and as a shared title
On October 13, 1982, the IOC gave Jim Thorpe back the two gold medals it had stripped from him in 1913 — posthumously, as newly struck copies, and with both titles shared with the men who had been given his medals.
On 13 October 1982 the International Olympic Committee agreed to give Jim Thorpe back the two gold medals it had taken from him, and to restore his amateur status. 1
He had been stripped of them 69 years earlier, for two summers of semi-professional baseball. 1
The same decision made him a co-champion. Both of his golds were now shared with the runners-up who had been handed his medals in 1913, and the record listed all three men as winners. 2
The vote rested on a rule found in a pamphlet behind a shelf in the Library of Congress. The record took another 39 years to catch up with it. 3
What he won
Thorpe was a Sac and Fox athlete who competed at the 1912 Stockholm Games for the Carlisle Indian School, and the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal. 4
The pentathlon came first, on 7 July. Thorpe won four of its five events and finished third in the javelin, an event he first contested that year. 5
The decathlon ran from 13 to 15 July. Thorpe placed in the top four in all ten events and scored 8,412.955 points; Hugo Wieslander, the Swedish favourite, finished 688 points behind him. 67
The two summers
In 1909 and 1910 Thorpe had played baseball in North Carolina, for Rocky Mount and Fayetteville in the Eastern Carolina League. 37
The pay was small: the reported figures run from $2 a game to $35 a week, or about $60 a month. The amateur rules of the day allowed none of it. 234
The story broke in the Worcester Telegram in January 1913, after a chance remark by Charles Clancy, who managed a team in the same league. 3
Formal charges followed on 25 January, and Thorpe signed a letter admitting the payments the next day. 3
"I hope I will be excused," the letter said, "because of the fact that I was simply an Indian school boy and did not know all about such things." 3
A teammate later told a congressional investigator that the letter had been drafted for him by his coach, Pop Warner, and the school's superintendent. 3
The Amateur Athletic Union withdrew his amateur status, and the IOC stripped his titles, medals and awards and declared him a professional. 7 Warner collected the trophies from Thorpe's house and shipped them back to Stockholm. 3
Where the medals went
The pentathlon gold went to Ferdinand Bie of Norway, and the decathlon gold to Wieslander of Sweden. 2
Wieslander refused to accept his, and said ever afterwards that Thorpe was the true winner. 7 The Swedish Olympic Committee and Wieslander's family confirmed as much in 2022. 8
The originals stayed where they had gone. In 1983 the IOC struck new copies for the family. 2
Sixty-nine years
Thorpe died in 1953, with the medals still in Scandinavian hands. 1
For twenty years the petitions ran into Avery Brundage, IOC president from 1952 to 1972 and Thorpe's teammate in the 1912 pentathlon, where Brundage finished sixth. 3 "Ignorance is no excuse," Brundage said. 7
The AAU restored Thorpe's amateur status in 1973. 3
Robert Wheeler and Florence Ridlon, who had campaigned for him for years, went looking for the rules of the 1912 Games. In July 1982 Ridlon found an orange-covered pamphlet that had fallen behind a shelf in the Library of Congress. 3
Rule 13 required any protest against a competitor to reach the Swedish Olympic Committee within 30 days of the prizes being given out. It also required a deposit of 20 Swedish kronor. 3
The AAU's disqualification letter had arrived long after that deadline. 3
With that, and a plea from William E. Simon, the president of the United States Olympic Committee, the IOC's executive committee voted on 13 October 1982. 19
What "restored" meant
The vote put Thorpe back in the IOC's records and gave him back his amateur status. It also made him a co-winner of each event, alongside the man who had been given his medal. 2
On 18 January 1983 the IOC met in Los Angeles. Its president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, presented Thorpe's children with gold medals to replace the two their father had handed back, and a silver replica for each of them. 2
Six of his seven children were there, and his son John wore the red regalia of his office as chief of the Sac and Fox. 2
"Well, the 70-year-old marathon is almost over," said his daughter Charlotte, who had led the campaign. 2
Samaranch said Thorpe's scores in the two events had beaten his rivals "by an incredible margin, which was only broken 30 years later." 2
The last four decades
The co-champion listing stood for forty years. In July 2020 a petition from Bright Path Strong, a group formed to share Native American voices, began collecting signatures asking the IOC to make Thorpe the sole winner; it drew 75,000. 4
The campaign had the support of Anita DeFrantz, a senior American member of the IOC, who called the 1913 disqualification "one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in sports history." 8
On 14 July 2022 the IOC voted to make Thorpe the sole champion of both events, moving Bie and Wieslander down to silver. 7 The announcement came on the 110th anniversary of the decathlon's last day. 8
"This is a most exceptional and unique situation," said the IOC's president, Thomas Bach, crediting "an extraordinary gesture of fair play" from the two countries' Olympic committees. 48
In 1913 Thorpe's name came out of the Olympic record books. It went back in alone in 2022, 110 years after he won the two events.
References
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6Decathlon, Men — Olympedia
olympedia.org
- 7Jim Thorpe — Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 8
- 9
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.