00:00He somehow managed to win Olympic events he barely even practiced and when his shoes were stolen
00:05during the decathlon he found a mismatched pair in the trash and still took home the gold. Jim
00:10Thorpe completely dominated the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. So why did the Olympic committee strip
00:16him of his medals months later and attempt to erase him from history? Well even though we know
00:21the Olympics today as being a display of some of the greatest athletes in the world it wasn't always
00:26like that. See the Olympics used to be only for amateur athletes supposedly because the founders
00:31believed that sports should strictly be about the love of the game and not money. However an
00:36interesting side effect of this was that only people with enough wealth and free time could
00:40afford to train and compete without needing to earn a living from sports. Which meant that the
00:45Olympics was mostly limited to wealthier participants and ended up excluding working-class athletes who
00:50needed to be paid for the time commitment. So when some of the elitist competitors were embarrassed
00:55by Jim the Native American who came rolling into every event in the pentathlon and decathlon
01:00absolutely dominating they weren't happy. So they started looking for a way to discredit him and
01:06it wasn't long before something came to the surface. See before his Olympic fame in 1912 Jim had played
01:12two seasons of semi-professional minor league baseball. He had earned barely enough for it to be
01:16considered his profession but when this fact was leaked by a reporter months later it was all that was
01:21needed to tear Jim down. The International Olympic Committee argued that by accepting any amount of
01:27money for playing a sport he wasn't a true pure amateur. Despite the fact that other white athletes
01:32were known to do the same thing they were just able to hide it better by using aliases in their
01:37professional careers. Jim's records were struck from the books and he was forced to return the gold
01:42medals he had clearly won. But despite this devastating decision Jim continued to become a legend in American
01:48sporting history. He played six seasons of Major League Baseball, a few seasons of professional
01:52basketball, 12 seasons of professional football and he was the first president of the American
01:57Professional Football Association now known as the NFL. But despite all of his fame professional
02:02sport didn't pay anything like it does today. So when his incredible athletic career ended Jim was
02:08forced to continue working as a laborer and a movie extra to support his family. Later on in his life
02:14as
02:14he tried to wrestle with the daily hassles that came with the dichotomy of being famous but poor along
02:19with the crushing and very public disappointment of his Olympic glory being stolen from him he ended
02:24up developing alcoholism in a desperate attempt to struggle through. Jim Thorpe died of heart failure
02:29at age 64 and after decades of his family and supporters fighting and campaigning in 1983 the
02:35International Olympic Committee finally restored his medals to his children. At first he was listed
02:40only as a co-champion. It wasn't until 2022, 110 years after his victories, that the record was
02:47finally fully corrected. Jim Thorpe was rightfully recognized as the sole gold medal winner of both
02:53the 1912 Pentathlon and Decathlon, cementing his place as perhaps the greatest athlete who ever lived.
