The life of Jim Thorpe, the man who won and lost two Olympic gold medals

Hans Bolling
PhD in History, Independent scholar

As far as I know, the first time Jim Thorpe was introduced to the Swedish public was less than a month before the start of the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. In June 1912 Ny Tidning för Idrott published an illustrated article in which he was presented not only as the all-around athlete from the United States who had the best prospects for success in the pentathlon and decathlon competitions, but as one of the best all-around athletes ever. He was said to be outstanding in whatever sport he played. History tells us that the writer did not exaggerate. When it was time to give out the medals, legend has it that the Swedish king called him the greatest athlete in the world and 112 years later Jim Thorpe still is the most talked about athlete of the Games, as a great athlete but also as a victim in a scandal involving the amateur rules and the statutes of limitation.

David Maraniss has written a comprehensive biography about this outstanding athlete, Path Lit by Lightning: The life of Jim Thorpe, 659 pages in all. Maraniss is well suited for the task. In the past he has written extensively about politics and sports, biographies over American presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and sporting legends Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi, as well as a book about the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. The first question one asks oneself when seeing the book is: Why call it Path Lit by Lightning? According to Maraniss it is “the most poetic” way to translate Thorpe’s Sac and Fox name Wa-tho-Huk to English. In one way Path Lit by Lightning is a run of the mill biography. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the book’s disposition; the fortunes and adventures of Jim Thorpe are told chronologically interleaved with political, cultural and sporting digressions.

He lost his Olympic medals the following year for breaches of the amateur rules and never really found his place after that, despite his extraordinary athletic ability and his celebrity.

The main features of Jim Thorpe’s life story should be well known to everyone. Born in the Indian Territory of central Oklahoma in 1887, he became a successful athlete at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and captivated an entire world at the Stockholm Games in 1912. He lost his Olympic medals the following year for breaches of the amateur rules and never really found his place after that, despite his extraordinary athletic ability and his celebrity. It is, of course, tempting to speculate about how Jim Thorpe’s life would have turned out had he not been disqualified for playing professional baseball. But as Maraniss notes, Jim Thorpe might not have been one of the most famous athletes of the 20th century if he had not had two moderately successful summers playing baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910. He had his sight set on major league baseball but ended up returning to Carlisle and the rest is history.

The most interesting chapters in the book are those dealing with Jim Thorpe’s life as an athlete after the Olympic Games in Stockholm. The roving life he was forced to live to be able to support himself and his family as miscellaneous sports worker after his disqualification is truly fascinating, playing baseball in the springs and summers, and football in the autumns. Although he started his ‘official’ professional career in New York City with the Giants and a world tour, as the years went by his career took him to a lot of places this reviewer never even heard of. That is equally true when it comes to the early years of professional football as it is with the different touring teams he joined in order to make ends meet. From a European perspective we like to complain about North Americans’ poor knowledge of geography, ‘they cannot even tell the difference between Sweden and Switzerland’, but it also applies vice versa. An atlas is a recommended aid in order to follow Jim Thorpe’s travels across the United States in search of sustenance.

The main story in the life of Jim Thorpe is the loss of the gold medals and challenge prizes he won in Stockholm. The trauma it caused survived him and was in inherited by his children. One cannot help but noticing that the athlete who through his superiority can be said to have humiliated two future IOC heavyweights with political sympathies that cannot be classified as liberal, Avery Brundage and Karl Ritter von Halt, turned out to be punished in retrospect for breaking the amateur rules. Rules that other participants had a very liberal approach to, the Italian gold medal winner in gymnastics Alberto Braglia being the most obvious example in fierce competition with the military officers taking part in the equestrian events. Especially given that according to the official rules of the games the time to protest against athletes not meeting the amateur statues expired after 30 days. Well worth noting is that when the news of Thorpe’s violation of the amateur rules broke in Sweden, there was no outrage. Göteborgs Aftonblad lamented the loss of a man the like of which amateur sport had never seen, a man who would not be born in a thousand years. There was also a plan by the Swedish athlete community to present a memorial gift to Jim Thorpe in the summer of 1913, a plan Sigfrid Edström put an end to referencing his contacts with American sports officials.

Path Lit by Lightning is well written and a joy to read and can be recommended not only to people with an keen interest in sport but also to people interested in American culture and the struggles of its native population. As a historian, however, it is necessary to try to judge whether the author has been thorough and written “wie es eigentlich gewesen”. With more than 50 pages of notes there is no reason to distrust Maraniss biography of Jim Thorpe, it is well supported. He is, however, a little ungenerous when it comes to the bibliography, but since the last book mentioned in the “Selected Bibliography” is The 1912 Olympics: Essays on the Competition, the People, the City this reviewer is not worried that the author has not read all relevant literature on his subject.

When all is said and done, I have one final question: Was Jim Thorpe a good human being? There is no doubt that he was a great athlete, unlucky and badly treated, but I don’t think that I would have liked him. It seems as there is truth in the expression ‘never meet your heroes’ and David Maraniss really lets the reader meet Jim Thorpe. In some ways Path Lit by Lightning reminds me of one of my favourite books, Torbjörn Säfve’s classical novel Siki, a book loosely based on the life of the Senegalese boxer Battling Siki. Both books tell the story about society and oppression, about class differences and racism, but also of men who squandered their talents.

Copyright © Hans Bolling 2024