King Gustav of Sweden handed him the gold medals saying,"Sir, you are the greatest athlete of them all." In the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Jim Thorpe who was of mixed American Indian, French and Irish descent, gave one of the most brilliant all-round performances in the history of athletics. He won both the pentathlon and the decathlon. (the pentathlon was discontinued from 1928).
Thorpe won the pentathlon with almost ridiculous ease, winning first position in four of the five events. He was third in the javelin throw which he had begun practising only two months before the Games. In the decathlon, which he had never attempted before, he won by an amazing margin of 688 points over his nearest rival, Hugo Wieslander of Sweden. It was a new world record, one that was not broken for 15 years.
Two months later, a Massachusetts paper revealed that Thorpe had been paid for playing minor league baseball in 1909-10. The International Olympic Committee decided that he had broken the rule of amateurism and stripped him of his gold medals. They were restored to him, or rather to his children, only on 18 January 1983. Thorpe had been dead thirty years by then.
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