At Long Last, Aau To Return Medals To Thorpe’s Family

The family of Jim Thorpe is expected to receive some of the medals once stripped from him when they attend a March ceremony in Wisconsin.

And the Leader-Telegram in Eau Claire reports that it’s all because of a simple question from a high school girl, who asked Keith Noll, president of the Wisconsin AAU, why the medals had not been returned.

Thorpe, born more than 100 years ago on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, was named the world’s greatest athlete for the first half of the 20th century by a panel of experts several decades ago.

Thorpe died in 1953.

He played professional football and baseball. But Thorpe is best remembered for winning gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Amateur Athletic Union national championships in Boston and the Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden.

He was stripped of those medals a year later, when it was discovered that he had played semipro baseball in the summers of 1909 and 1910. The International Olympic Committee restored Thorpe’s amateur standing in 1982, and returned the medals to his family at a ceremony during the 1984 Olympics.

The AAU, whose national championships served as the U.S. Olympic Trials until 1978, restored Thorpe’s amateur standing in 1973. But the organization never returned the medals they took from him.