Jim Thorpe won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Stockholm Games wearing mismatched shoes he found in a trash can — because someone had stolen his. He was then stripped of those medals because he had earned a few dollars playing minor league baseball, violating amateur rules that applied to everyone but were enforced only against him. The greatest all-around athlete in American history was a Native American from Oklahoma whom the system cheated at every turn.
This episode traces Thorpe from the Sac and Fox Nation through the Carlisle Indian School, the Stockholm Olympics, the medal stripping, and the professional football and baseball careers that could not save him from poverty and alcoholism.
Thorpe's Sac and Fox origins, the Carlisle Indian School, and the football dominance that preceded the Olympics
The 1912 Stockholm Olympics — two gold medals won in mismatched trash can shoes
The medal stripping for "professionalism" and the racial double standard behind it
The NFL and MLB careers, the alcoholism, the poverty, and the posthumous medal restoration in 2022
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