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 the only people with enough wealth and free time could afford to
00:41train and compete without needing to earn a living from sports. Which meant that the Olympics was
00:46mostly limited to wealthier participants and ended up excluding working-class athletes who needed to
00:51be paid for the time commitment. So when some of the elitist competitors were embarrassed by Jim
00:56the Native American who came rolling into every event in the pentathlon and decathlon absolutely
01:01dominating they weren't happy. So they started looking for a way to discredit him and it wasn't
01:06long before something came to the surface. See before his Olympic fame in 1912 Jim had played two
01:12seasons of semi-professional minor league baseball. He had earned barely enough for it to be considered his
01:17profession but when this fact was leaked by a reporter months later it was all that was needed to tear
01:22Jim
01:22down. The International Olympic Committee argued that by accepting any amount of money for playing
01:27a sport he wasn't a true pure amateur. Despite the fact that other white athletes were known to do the
01:33same thing they were just able to hide it better by using aliases in their professional careers. Jim's
01:38records were struck from the books and he was forced to return the gold medals he had clearly won. But
01:44despite this devastating decision Jim continued to become a legend in American sporting history. He played six
01:49seasons of major league baseball, a few seasons of professional basketball, 12 seasons of professional
01:54football and he was the first president of the American professional football association now known
01:59as the NFL. But despite all of his fame professional sport didn't pay anything like it does today. So when
02:05his incredible athletic career ended Jim was forced to continue working as a laborer and a movie extra to
02:12support his family. Later on in his life as he tried to wrestle with the daily hassles that came with
02:16the
02:16dichotomy of being famous but poor. Along with the crushing and very public disappointment of his
02:21Olympic glory being stolen from him he ended up developing alcoholism in a desperate attempt to
02:27struggle through. Jim Thorpe died of heart failure at age 64 and after decades of his family and supporters
02:32fighting and campaigning in 1983 the International Olympic Committee finally restored his medals to his
02:38children. At first he was listed only as a co-champion. It wasn't until 2022, 110 years after
02:45his victories that the record was finally fully corrected. Jim Thorpe was rightfully recognized as
02:51the sole gold medal winner of both the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, cementing his place as perhaps the
02:57greatest athlete who ever lived.
