He Won Olympic Gold, Then Had It Taken Away for Playing Baseball for Money

Jim Thorpe won gold medals in both the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, widely regarded as one of the greatest all-around athletic performances in Olympic history.

Less than a year later, officials stripped him of both medals. His crime wasn’t cheating during the competition itself. It was having played minor league baseball for a small amount of money years earlier.

A rule that punished poverty, not dishonesty

For most of the early modern Olympics, competitors had to be strict amateurs, meaning they’d never been paid to compete in any sport, in order to remain eligible. The rule was rooted in a class-based idea from wealthy European sporting circles: true athletic excellence should come from love of the sport alone, not financial need, and anyone who’d ever accepted payment was considered tainted as a “professional.”

In practice, this rule disproportionately hurt athletes from working-class backgrounds, who often had genuine financial need to accept small payments for playing sports, unlike wealthier competitors who could afford to compete purely for love of the game without needing the money.

Thorpe’s case became the most famous example

Thorpe had played a small amount of minor league baseball in 1909 and 1910 for modest pay, a common practice among young American athletes at the time trying to make ends meet. When this became public after his Olympic triumph, the International Olympic Committee ruled he’d violated amateur status rules and stripped him of his medals entirely, erasing his results from the official record.

Thorpe himself said simply that he didn’t know he’d been doing anything wrong. Playing minor league baseball for small pay was common enough among young athletes of his era that many didn’t consider it any different from casual, informal competition.

A wrong that took decades to fix

For 70 years, Thorpe’s Olympic records remained officially erased. It wasn’t until 1982 that the International Olympic Committee finally reinstated his amateur status and restored his medals, decades after his death, following sustained pressure from historians and Thorpe’s own family who’d spent years arguing the original punishment was unjust and inconsistently applied compared to how other athletes’ minor rule violations were treated.

Why the amateur rule eventually disappeared

Thorpe’s case became one of the clearest examples of how the Olympics’ strict amateur rule often punished working-class athletes far more harshly than wealthier ones, who rarely needed to accept payment in the first place and therefore rarely faced the same risk.

The rule was gradually loosened through the late 20th century before finally being scrapped almost entirely by the 1980s, allowing openly professional athletes to compete at the Olympics in most sports.

Thorpe never lived to see his medals restored. His case remains one of the clearest examples of how a rule meant to protect the purity of amateur competition instead punished an athlete simply for being poor.