Sac and Fox Nation athlete widely considered the greatest American athlete of the 20th century — winning Olympic gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon (1912), playing professional baseball and football — stripped of his medals for having been paid to play baseball before the Olympics, which were restored posthumously.
Represents the greatest natural athletic talent in American sports history combined with the systematic injustice visited on Native American success — Thorpe's story (stripped of medals for a technicality that white athletes routinely violated without penalty) encapsulates the double standard applied to Native American achievement in American life.
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