Not only that.............he played pro baseball, pro football...................and pro basketball............one of his daughters related a story that he took her when she was young to a full length American football field..............back then the goal posts were along the end zone..........the 1st line.........not the back...........but regardless..............she said he took a football, stood at midfield and punted it through the uprights at one end..............took another football, and punted it at the uprights at the other end..............but hit the goal post............................just to have enough leg strength and be that accurate....................as well as win two Olympic gold medals in very difficult types of competition to playing 3 sports professionally...............he gets my vote.....................if u wanted to narrow it down to one single best athlete..............
Olympic career[edit]
For the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, two new multi-event disciplines were included, the pentathlon and the decathlon. A pentathlon, based on the ancient Greek event, had been introduced at the 1906 Summer Olympics. The 1912 version consisted of the long jump, javelin throw, 200-meter dash, discus throw and 1500-meter run.
The decathlon was a relatively new event in modern athletics, although it had been part of American track meets since the 1880s and a version had been featured on the program of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. The events of the new decathlon differed slightly from the American version. Both seemed appropriate for Thorpe, who was so versatile that he served as Carlisle's one-man team in several track meets.[6] He could run the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds flat, the 220 in 21.8 seconds, the 440 in 51.8 seconds, the 880 in 1:57, the mile in 4:35, the 120-yard high hurdles in 15 seconds, and the 220-yard low hurdles in 24 seconds.[6] He could long jump 23 ft 6 in and high-jump 6 ft 5 in.[6] He could pole vault 11 feet, put the shot 47 ft 9 in, throw the javelin 163 feet, and throw the discus 136 feet.[6]
Thorpe entered the U.S. Olympic trials for both the pentathlon and the decathlon. He won the awards easily, winning three events, and was named to the pentathlon team, which also included future International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage. There were only a few candidates for the decathlon team, however, and the trials were cancelled.
His schedule in the Olympics was busy. Along with the decathlon and pentathlon, he competed in the long jump and high jump. The first competition was the pentathlon. He won four of the five events and placed third in the javelin, an event he had not competed in before 1912. Although the pentathlon was primarily decided on place points, points were also earned for the marks achieved in the individual events. He won the gold medal. That same day, he qualified for the high jump final in which he placed fourth, and also took seventh place in the long jump. Even more remarkably, because someone had stolen his shoes just before he was due to compete, he found some discarded ones in a rubbish bin and won his medals wearing them.[19] He is shown in the 1912 photo wearing two different shoes and extra socks because one shoe was too big.
| Olympic medal record | ||
|---|---|---|
| Men's athletics | ||
Representing the  United States | ||
| Gold | 1912 Stockholm | Decathlon |
| Gold | 1912 Stockholm | Pentathlon |
Thorpe's final event was the decathlon, his first — and as it turned out, his only — Olympic decathlon. Strong competition from local favorite Hugo Wieslander was expected. Thorpe, however, easily defeated Wieslander by more than 700 points. He placed in the top four in all ten events, and his Olympic record of 8,413 points would stand for nearly two decades.[13] Overall, Thorpe won eight of the 15 individual events comprising the pentathlon and decathlon.
As was the custom of the day, the medals were presented to the athletes during the closing ceremonies of the games. Along with the two gold medals, Thorpe also received two challenge prizes, which were donated by King Gustav V of Sweden for the decathlon and Czar Nicholas II of Russia for the pentathlon. Several sources recount that, when awarding Thorpe his prize, King Gustav said, "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world", to which Thorpe replied, "Thanks, King".[20][21] Contemporary sources from 1912 are lacking, suggesting that the story was apocryphal, however.[22] The anecdote appeared in newspapers as early as 1948, 36 years after his appearance in the Olympics,[23] and in books as early as 1952.[24]
Thorpe's successes had not gone unnoticed at home, and he was honored with a ticker-tape parade on Broadway.[20] He remembered later, "I heard people yelling my name, and I couldn't realize how one fellow could have so many friends."[20]
Apart from his track and field appearances, he also played in one of two exhibition baseball games at the 1912 Olympics, which featured two teams composed of U.S. track and field athletes. It was not Thorpe's first try at baseball, as the public would soon learn.
All-Around Champion[edit]
After his victories at the Olympic Games in Sweden, on September 2, 1912, he returned to Celtic Park, the home of the Irish American Athletic Club, in Queens, New York (where he had qualified four months earlier for the Olympic Games), to compete in the Amateur Athletic Union's All-Around Championship. Competing against Bruno Brodd of the Irish American Athletic Club and J. Bredemus of Princeton University, he won seven of the ten events contested and came in second in the remaining three. With a total point score of 7,476 points, Thorpe broke the previous record of 7,385 points set in 1909, (also set at Celtic Park), by Martin Sheridan, the champion athlete of the Irish American Athletic Club.[25] Sheridan, a five-time Olympic gold medalist, was present to watch his record broken, approached Thorpe after the event and shook his hand saying, "Jim, my boy, you're a great man. I never expect to look upon a finer athlete." He told a reporter from The New York World, "Thorpe is the greatest athlete that ever lived. He has me beaten fifty ways. Even when I was in my prime, I could not do what he did today."[26]
Controversy[edit]
In 1912, strict rules regarding amateurism were in effect for athletes participating in the Olympics. Athletes who received money prizes for competitions, were sports teachers or had competed previously against professionals were not considered amateurs and were barred from competition.
In late January 1913, the Worcester Telegram published a story announcing that Thorpe had played professional baseball, and other U.S. newspapers followed up the story.[20][27] Thorpe had indeed played professional baseball in the Eastern Carolina League for Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1909 and 1910, receiving meager pay; reportedly as little as US$2 ($51 today) per game and as much as US$35 ($886 today) per week.[28] College players, in fact, regularly spent summers playing professionally but most used aliases, unlike Thorpe.[12]
Although the public didn't seem to care much about Thorpe's past,[29] the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and especially its secretary James Edward Sullivan, took the case very seriously.[30] Thorpe wrote a letter to Sullivan, in which he admitted playing professional baseball:[20]
His letter didn't help. The AAU decided to withdraw Thorpe's amateur status retroactively and asked the International Olympic Commission (IOC) to do the same. Later that year, the IOC unanimously decided to stripThorpe of his Olympic titles, medals and awards and declare him a professional.
Although Thorpe had played for money, the AAU and IOC did not follow the rules for disqualification. The rulebook for the 1912 Olympics stated that protests had to be made "within" 30 days from the closing ceremonies of the games.[17] The first newspaper reports did not appear until January 1913, about six months after the Stockholm Games had concluded.[17] There is also some evidence that Thorpe's amateur status had been questioned long before the Olympics, but the AAU had ignored the issue until being confronted with it in 1913.
The only positive element of this affair for Thorpe was that, as soon as the news was reported that he had been declared a professional, he received offers from professional sports clubs.[31]
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