Jim Thorpe won TWO Olympic golds — then they TOOK THEM AWAY #shorts #history #sportshistory #olympic

In 1912, one man was called the greatest athlete in the world. Then they erased him.

Jim Thorpe — a Sac and Fox Nation athlete raised in the Indian boarding school system — showed up to the Stockholm Olympics and did something no one had ever done. He won gold in the pentathlon AND the decathlon. King Gustav V of Sweden told him to his face: 'You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.

But six months after the Games, a newspaper dug up a secret. Years before Stockholm, Thorpe had played two seasons of semi-professional baseball — earning about $2 a game. Under strict Olympic rules at the time, that made him a professional. And professionals were banned.

The IOC stripped him of both medals. His records were scratched from the books. The men who finished second were retroactively handed gold. But here's what makes it worse — almost every other Olympic athlete at those Games had done the same thing. They just weren't Native American. They weren't Jim Thorpe.

Thorpe went on to become a two-sport professional legend — All-American in football, Major League Baseball star. But those medals were gone. He died in 1953, never seeing them returned. It took until 1983 — thirty years after his death — for the IOC to finally restore his name. His family received duplicate medals. The originals? Never found.

Follow The History Vault for the stories they didn't teach you.