Jim Thorpe Won Two 1912 Olympic Golds in Mismatched Shoes — and Lost Them for $25

Jim Thorpe, born around 1887 in what is now Oklahoma to a mother of the Sac and Fox Nation, won the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics in two of the most dominant athletic performances of the twentieth century. He took four of the five pentathlon events outright. He placed in the top four of all ten decathlon events for a winning score of 8,413 — a world best that stood until 1932. The famous detail of the decathlon is that someone had stolen Thorpe's shoes that morning. He went to the trash bin behind the stadium, found a discarded right shoe, dug a left out of a teammate's locker, and competed in mismatched footwear. King Gustav V of Sweden, presenting the medals, told him: "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world."

In January 1913, the Worcester Telegram reported that Thorpe had played minor-league baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910 for somewhere between $2 and $35 a week, using his real name. The Amateur Athletic Union and the IOC, on receiving the report, retroactively disqualified him as a professional and stripped both medals. The protest period for that kind of disqualification was 30 days from the events. The objection was filed six months past it.

Thorpe played Major League Baseball through the war and pro football into his forties. He worked construction during the Depression and appeared as an extra in over 70 films. The IOC partially restored his amateur status and presented commemorative medals to his children in 1983, thirty years after his death. In July 2022, after a campaign by the Bright Path Strong Foundation, the IOC reinstated him as the sole gold medalist in both events.