Thorpe's scandal-tainted 1912 golds still resonate, amaze

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — It has been described as the first major international sports scandal, and still resonates more than a century later.

Jim Thorpe, a Native American who seemed to excel at every sport he tried, was seen as one of the world's top athletes after winning gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Some of his performances went unmatched for decades.

The King of Sweden was certainly impressed.

“Sir,” King Gustav V told Thorpe, “you are the greatest athlete in the world.”

Thorpe was welcomed back to the United States with a ticker-tape parade in New York. Instantly, he become a celebrity.

Then, months later, the cruel kicker.

It was discovered that Thorpe, hoping to get scouted for the major leagues, had played minor league baseball over two summers in North Carolina, an infringement of the strict Olympic amateurism rules of the time. He was stripped of his gold medals.

“It hurt him deeply,” Kate Buford, author of 2010 book “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe," told The Associated Press. “The shame and shock of what was the first and biggest international sports scandal was like a nightmare that never ended.”

Thorpe would go on to play professional football and baseball and, to some, remains the greatest all-around athlete ever. He was voted as the Associated Press’ Athlete of the Half Century in a poll in 1950.

Yet, he never got to really cherish those gold medals from Stockholm, duplicates of which were given to his family by the International Olympic Committee in 1982 following a campaign by his family and supporters but 29 years after Thorpe’s death. His Olympic record were not reinstated, though, nor was his status as the sole gold medalist of the two events.

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source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Thorpe-s-scandal-tainted-1912-golds-still-15435365.php