James Ring Adams on how Avery Brundage blocked the reinstatement of Jim Thorpe's gold medals while IOC president

Thorpe’s family and friends kept petitioning the IOC to restore his rightful honors.  The campaign only intensified after Thorpe’s death in 1953.  It encountered stubborn resistance, however, from a person with a vested interest in making Thorpe an unperson.  From 1952 to 1972, the president of the IOC was the American Avery Brundage.  By strange coincidence, Brundage was not only Thorpe’s teammate in the 1912 Olympics, he competed against Thorpe in the pentathlon and decathlon, finishing sixth in the pentathlon.  With Thorpe removed from the amateur ranks, Brundage became national all-around champion, a standing that he later admitted helped open doors to his construction business. 

A self-righteous, vindictive sort, Brundage was typecast for the role of villain in the Thorpe affair.  He has been blamed, more or less implausibly, for everything from ratting out Thorpe to the IOC to stealing his track shoes at Stockholm.  One of Thorpe’s leading biographers, Robert Wheeler, doubts that Brundage was involved in the original disqualification, but Brundage more than made up for it in later life by his curt dismissal of petitions for Thorpe’s reinstatement, some of them organized by Thorpe’s daughter, Grace, and by Wheeler himself.

~ James Ring Adams, "The Jim Thorpe Backlash: The Olympic Medals Debacle and the Demise of Carlisle," American Indian, Summer 2012