Jul 23, 2022 3 min read

If you’re traveling through Carbon County in the eastern part of Pennsylvania, you might end up in the oddly named borough of Jim Thorpe.

Bearing the moniker of the Olympic sportsman who was named the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century in a 1950 Associated Press poll, Thorpe’s remains rest there, even though he never set foot in the community. After he died of a heart attack in a California trailer in 1953, Thorpe’s widow cut an unusual deal with the community that was then called Mauch Chunk – if they would memorialize his accomplishments and change the town’s name to his, she would ship his body there. Despite efforts in the last decade to return his body to his native Oklahoma, his body has been in the borough ever since, in a red granite mausoleum built on soil from his home state, and from Stockholm’s Olympic Stadium, where Thorpe attained his greatest glory.

It was in Stockholm in 1912 that Thorpe won gold medals in the decathlon and the pentathlon, only to have them stripped from him the following year. The reason? He had earned some money a few years before playing baseball in North Carolina. Olympic authorities contended that they were merely following the rules limiting the games to amateurs. But the challenge to his status was made long after a two-month window for making such a claim had closed. Thorpe’s supporters have also long held that stripping him of the medals carried the whiff of racism, since Thorpe was an American Indian.

In 1982, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) took a step toward making amends by naming Thorpe the co-winner of the events in which he participated. But advocates for Thorpe continued to assert that he needed to be declared the sole winner, and earlier this month the IOC agreed. The record books will show he was the winner, with no asterisk attached to his name.

Restoring Jim Thorpe’s records and medals is part of a larger, concerted attempt around the world in recent years to make amends for past wrongs and injuries. Here in the United States, statues of Confederate “heroes” have been falling, Juneteenth has been made a state and federal holiday and the achievements of marginalized groups that were ignored in their day are receiving recognition. The New York Times has been publishing feature obituaries on individuals who were overlooked in their time. Across the Atlantic, the Church of England has apologized for its role in the slave trade and, in June, the Belgian monarch offered “regrets” for his country’s brutal colonization of the Congo.

David Maraniss, who has written extensively on both politics and sports and has a biography of Thorpe in the pipeline, said in a column in The Washington Post that Thorpe had been restored “to his deserved place in sports history. … More than a century late but better late than never.”

“Down for decades too long,” Maraniss added. “Now, at last, up again.”

Indeed.