Jim Thorpe reinstated as sole winner of 1912 Olympic gold medals | Hacker News Reader

Jim Thorpe reinstated as sole winner of 1912 Olympic gold medals

axios.com

90 pointscwwc47 comments

For more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe#Controversy

It's interesting to me that playing any sport for tiny amounts of money would disqualify you (well after any petition was required to be filed) from competing in any Olympic sport. The way the rule was enforced by Sullivan does seem to raise issues of fairness, but even the rule it self seemed to be designed to reject honest people of lower classes. By those strict rules playing a game of darts or pool for a quarter even after you finished competing should result in the removal of medals.

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/07/20/...

It used to disqualify US college athletes too. They can't make money on their College fame (that is changing..). But its weird. I was at UMass (University of Massachusetts) when they had a NCAA tournament class team. For UMass the transgressions of their star player cost the school their victories and revenue...

"However, NCAA sanctions stripped the Minutemen of their 1996 NCAA Tournament victories. The sanctions, based on star Marcus Camby admitting he took money, clothes, and jewelry from an agent during the season, removed the Final Four from the record books. Additionally, 45% of tournament revenue had to be returned to the NCAA. Camby reimbursed the school for the $151,617 in lost revenue." [1]

Basketball (or football) vs other non-revenue sports are a weird thing at a state school that had revenue shortfalls. The most highly paid state employees are often these coaches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMass_Minutemen_basketball#Joh...

WTF!

He had to pay the school for their lost revenue?

I never realized just how accurate the Cartman as slave owner episode was.

I don't think he was forced to; he signed an $8M contract that same year. Here's some more detail https://vault.si.com/vault/1997/09/15/tangled-web-marcus-cam....

A young person from a disadvantaged background pays back an institution worth billions for “lost revenue”.

How many times did the school sell out the arena with his name on the top of the player list?

Umass lost nothing for having recruited him. He paid that money back because of media and social pressure, not an overriding sense of right and wrong.

I don’t know many 20 year olds, of any background, that would turn down $100k of under the table benefits. If the NCAA thinks it’s wrong, they should go after the corrupting influences, not the poor kid.

To be fair it was a pretty broke state university. Although it did build a new basketball/hockey arena at the time. Also basketball games for students were free (and about half of the seats were reserved for them). Amherst were the university is is quite far from any cities. I imagine it helped the university financially but it's a weird system UMass has. I photographed the team back then for the college paper..(I have signed photograph of him dunking I took)

After the basketball program catered. As an alumni I think it's for the best. University sports are great till they turn into money making afairs. but the article makes clear he was making a huge amount in the NBA and was trying to be fair.

The spirit of amateur athleticism was a noble one, which I mean both as praise and critique. There was a real distinction, no different in spirit than that between junior sports and adult sports.

Class privilege was a real thing, sure, and the Jim Thorpe story in fact shows that, by custom, a poor boy could earn some extra money playing in the minors under an assumed name, which Thorpe just didn't know due to his background.

Today, being an amateur tennis player means you've had thousands of hours of professional coaching, there aren't really exceptions, although there's enough charity that exceptionally talented players do get that coaching sometimes.

Back then, it meant you played tennis. This is already long so I'll refrain from talking about the wacky and fake rules around NCAA amateur status; I'll content myself with saying that more change is needed.

Is this all that different from the way the NCAA rules about payment have been (and perhaps, still are) unevenly interpreted and applied?

NCAA doesn't say that playing darts when you're 67 disqualifies you from college bowl wins at 20. That is, however, how the Olympic rules were read. Collecting any money from any competitive sport at any time disqualified all earlier or later achievements.

Oh, actually, it would also be all player's who's coaches were paid (because that also wasn't allowed) so I guess every NCAA player would be disqualified?

> receiving meager pay; reportedly as little as US$2 ($58 today) per game and as much as US$35 ($1,018 today) per week

Not a lot, but 4K a month is not exactly meager.

Except that it only applies during the baseball season. And that top figure would apply to only a few weeks of that season.

It wouldn't be possible to make $48k a year out of it -- probably no more than a quarter of that. That's pretty meager. At the very least you'd need a job in the off-season, and it would have to be a job you could drop during the season.

> Lot a lot, but 4K a month is not exactly meager.

For further context, $1,018/wk is just below the $1,037/wk median income of full time workers in the US today.

Except that it's a part time job without benefits, you can't hold it full time by definition. It's like being a ski bum for 3-4 months.

Thorpe's parents were both of mixed-race ancestry. His father, Hiram Thorpe, had an Irish father and a Sac and Fox Indian mother. His mother, Charlotte Vieux, had a French father and a Potawatomi mother, a descendant of Chief Louis Vieux.

Thorpe was raised as a Sac and Fox, and his native name, Wa-Tho-Huk, is translated as "path lit by great flash of lightning" or, more simply, "Bright Path". As was the custom for Sac and Fox, he was named for something occurring around the time of his birth, in this case the light brightening the path to the cabin where he was born.

Just wow.

>receiving meager pay; reportedly as little as US$2 ($58 today) per game

It is both interesting and frustrating to note how little those salaries have increased over time. That inflation adjusted number of $58 per game that is described as "meager pay" would exceed the minimum of $290 per week for MLB affiliated minor league players as of 2020. After pressure, MLB recently raised it to $400 which works out to $67 a game if we assume 6 games a week. Still well below minimum wage if we consider the actual time investment that these people make.

This is all because of the antitrust exemption that the Supreme Court granted MLB in 1922 which has yet to be overturned. Since then, there has been one carve out for the antitrust exemption for major league players, which is why they make millions and minor league players still make that same "meager pay". It is a good lesson in the power of antitrust regulations and collective bargaining.

I'm not in the US and don't follow baseball, so I don't know, but it sounds to me more like a reflection of people 'caring about'/following/paying for the major league disproportionately more than minor ones?

I don't think it's unusual in sports to have relatively little ground between amateur and superstar.

Sort of also makes sense (if you think massive 'superstar' salaries are a given) in that the best are generally going to be quite young, highly talented players; so it's not like you have a long career progression's worth of salaries from 30k to 30M to work through.

Yes, people care more about the major leagues than the minors, but people are still paying to see minor league baseball and it still makes money. Also practically every player in the majors was at one point in the minors, usually for 3+ years for even the best players.

I'm also not suggesting that minor league players need to make millions, but there was literally an act of Congress passed a few years ago to allow these people to be paid below minimum wage[1]. How is that in any way fair? It is abusive monopolistic behavior and I don't think there is much validity to any argument otherwise.

[1] - https://apnews.com/article/minor-league-baseball-lawsuits-ap...

Coincidently a couple of hours after this comment, MLB reached a $185m class-action settlement with minor league players over unpaid wages[1].

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-16/mlb-agree...

Glad to hear. Jim Thorpe seems like a really amazing dude.

Slightly-off topic: if you're ever passing through Pennsylvania, check out the town Jim Thorpe. The waterfall hike there is top-notch.

Thanks for the tip. I am, by coincidence, going to be in Jim Thorpe next month.

    if you're ever passing through Pennsylvania, check out the town Jim Thorpe.

Particularly beautiful up there in the fall, when the leaves are changing colors!

Fun fact for others that you surely know: the town had no connection to him until obtaining his remains (!!!) and renaming from "Mauch Chunk" to "Jim Thorpe" to cash in on his popularity. Bit of controversy surrounding that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe,_Pennsylvania#Renam...

I do not really understand the fetishism we have with sports purity.

I play volleyball for fun with a team that is at my level. The "last in business league" kind of level.

I have fun and this is not my job For my job I do whatever ot takes to succeed and nobody cares as long as I do my job properly.

My point is that pro athletes should be allowed to do whatever to improve their results. Including doping, i.e. taking the substances appropriate for their results.

You need to be better at speed? Red pill.

They are not normal (= in the general norm) people anyway. I will never run 100 m in 10 seconds, nor will anybody in the 99% of the population.

So why pretending this is sport for everyone? And if we don't, why blocking them from getting even better results?

The consequence of such a mentality leads to an arms race that would only allow economic powerhouses and totalitarian countries to even have a chance in the Olympics. How many athletes are you willing to condemn to an early death for national prestige?

A good friend of mine once was, at the age of six, a potential future Olympic gymnast. At this age (and many athletes start very young) it's the trainers and sports associations in the background that make the decisions about the athletes' health. Do you really want them to give children all kinds of experimental drugs for a slight advantage to win a gold medal?

> The consequence of such a mentality leads to an arms race that would only allow economic powerhouses and totalitarian countries to even have a chance in the Olympics

The 2022 results are exactly this. Being generous, Slovenia is at the 15th place (before that it is either powerful countries or totalitarian ones (at least from some points of view)). Then I has to scroll down quite a bit to find Belarus.

I did not see Sierra Leone there, nor Cambodia.

> How many athletes are you willing to condemn to an early death for national prestige?

This is a choice the athlete makes. Plenty of people make bad choices in life and nobody cares.

> A good friend of mine once was, at the age of six, a potential future Olympic gymnast. At this age (and many athletes start very young) it's the trainers and sports associations in the background that make the decisions about the athletes' health. Do you really want them to give children all kinds of experimental drugs for a slight advantage to win a gold medal?

My wife was a European vice-champion in athletics. She dropped sport when her new coaches told her that it is either sport, or studies. She dropped her beloved sport in one second to study - because this is how she was raised. She went on to train at the university, then for fun.

When you look at what some children as forced to do in ballet or music - thi sis almost torture but this is for the arts and therefore fantastic.

My point is that people who do sport make that choice and they get into a completely abnormal life anyway.

There is no more "pure sport" at a competitive level, except maybe for some exotic ones like curling or quidditch.

Nothing the IOC does matters. They're corporate fucking shill-sellout whores, and anything the "olympics" stood for stopped being real long ago.

The records and achievements of all humans who've exhibited great skill stand, irrespective of the lame "IOC's recognition".

Yes. Please just let this corrupt shit-show fade into obscurity along with FIFA.

This article doesn't say why it matters whether an athlete had previously earned money playing sports. Was it untrue that he had earned money previously? Was that rule not uniformly enforced? TFA doesn't say.

Also, why was he previously considered a co-winner? What does that even mean?

I can't tell from the article why the current result, which appears to be the third, is the correct one. Does anyone else know more about the situation, the rules, and why the current result is the correct one?

The Olympics were supposed to be for amateurs only, not professional athletes. This is a distinction that disappeared primarily when the Soviets made it nonsensical (as Communism meant a disconnect with what you did and why you were paid), and I remember into the 90's it was discussed when the NBA "Dream Team" was formed for the Olympics.

Why it was so important they be amateurs, I couldn't tell you.

Classicism. It was really so that the upper-classes could keep the working classes out of it. They had their own money, so they could be amateurs and not make money from competition. Where as regular people needed to also make money in sports to just survive.

This seems like the most simple answer where money, power and privilege continue to take every step necessary to restrict leakage.

Is there research that supports this, though? Or even "amateur" analysis of these times and the players and patterns of behavior that indicate rule-making in the IOC with this aim?

There’s a parallel with unpaid internships at elite institutions. Who can afford an unpaid internship?

This has been discussed in startupland as well.

The idea being: founders often come from fairly wealthy circumstances or support structures.

That way, if they fail they can be rescued (~can still move in with mom or dad).

And thus, the wealthy are most at liberty to take risks offering potentially outsized returns without paying the price others might.

This is a key reason why I strongly believe that UBI would be a massive boon to entrepreneurship. If everyone had that sort of safety net, we'd see a lot more startups and a lot more upward socioeconomic mobility.

My understanding is that it was classism. That is, only the "right" people could dedicate themselves to becoming a world-class athlete without any financial support, and they didn't want to complete with the "wrong" people. I think you can see similar in how "prize fight" boxing was initially looked down upon as a corruption of gentlemanly dueling.

(Can't find sources for this right now, sorry. And I'm not even positive I am remembering it correctly. So perhaps take my response with a grain of salt.)

I've read articles to this affect as well.

I have social clubs near me that start at 45,000 a year to join. (You're required to spend a lot of money). Men only up until somewhat recently.

Basically golf/tennis and dining for rich folks or people they are trying to impress. Got invited a lot when I would work directly with fortune 100 CEO's. Was both fun and educational.

Interesting to meet board members of companies I loved / hated.

At the time only amateurs were allowed to compete. Taking money made you a professional.

I don’t think there’s any dispute that he did make money as a player. However, the wikipedia page says that disqualifications had to be made within 30 days of the close of the games. His occurred 6 months later. So that sounds like grounds to disqualify the disqualification itself, so to speak. It was invalid under the rules.

Also, I have not seen this as a consideration but it appears an important distinction to me, he made money playing baseball, but entered (and won) the Olympics in track and field, that is, not his professional sport.

>However, the wikipedia page says that disqualifications had to be made within 30 days of the close of the games. His occurred 6 months later. So that sounds like grounds to disqualify the disqualification itself, so to speak.

The question is, if the participating athletes were aware of that rule. If so, then Thorpe willingly broke the rule regardless of whether it was enforced within 6 months or not.

I haven't read the axios article but all the questions you asked were answered in the NYT article I read about it this morning.

* Its not disputed that he did earn money playing minor league baseball for $25/wk a couple years prior to the Olympics.

* The IOC rules stated that he could lose his medals for this, but there's only a 30 day window to enforce the rule. The IOC enforced this rule "the next year." I'm not sure if this was enforced unevenly, but there are insinuations that this was due to his race.

* In 1982, the IOC, under pressure, re-instated him as "Co-winner" of the medals to appease critics. This did not appease them.

Additionally someone was able to talk to the two other “gold medal” winner’s families about their medals beung changed to silver so that Thorpe could be changed to sole gold medal winner. The previous silver and bronze winners retain their medals.

I guess I’m surprised to hear that the case is considered exceptional and unique. Maybe it’s unique regarding the specific issue of amateurism. My instinct is that there must be many controversial results from the early Olympics where we might seek to rectify historical inequity. I just can’t believe it was all squeaky clean.

This feels like the correct decision, but not one of much value. Jim Thorpe died in 1953, nearly 70 years ago. Their previous ruling was in 1982, nearly 30 years after his death. I'm not sure who gained from the ruling in either case, perhaps his family was made to feel better by it, although I doubt they were satisfied by the "co-winner" title? By now, they're a good chance his children have all passed, or are beyond the point of caring as well.

If the International Olympic Committee wants to enjoy the prestige of their continuity as one games, one entity, going back 130 years, then they also need to own their mistakes as one entity, going back 130 years.

If you look at the website of the organisation that lobbied for this (https://brightpathstrong.org/about/), you'll see that several of Thorpe's grandchildren are honorary board members, as well as prominent tribal leaders and others, and the cause has been championed by congresswoman Deb Haaland, so clearly many people do care. In their own words,

> Native Americans have been invariably impacted by the ever-climbing barriers and setbacks of racism in the U.S., and the world of sports is no different...

To call Jim Thorpe a co-champion in his events isn't just inaccurate, it stands as a painful reminder of the deep inequities even the most triumphant athletes of color have faced

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