Jim Thorpe Leaves No More Room For Excuses: Let The Justice Afforded To One Man Be Extended To Generations Of Olympic Women
Editorial/Weekend Essay – The restoration and recognition of Jim Thorpe is complete, at home and abroad, the reinstated 1912 Native American double track and field Olympic champion named alongside Katie Ledecky and others on the latest list of those honoured with the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom.
With a wave of related news in the U.S., one celebration caught the eye above all else: NBC, the Olympic broadcaster whose rights money stretches not only to funding the Olympic Movement and its “non-profit” activities and businesses but also to influence when it comes to the likes of holding morning not evening finals in swimming at those Games held in places least favourable to American prime-time and the domestic benefits that flow.
No issue with NBC celebrating Thorpe, Ledecky and any other Americans who play fair and excel in Olympic sport, of course, but the shadow on the story draws the eye when mountains are moved in timeframes stretching beyond the lifetime of a single man to ensure that Olympic and natural justice is done, even if that means stretching any prevailing rules, dumb as they may seem to us in the context of our time.
As Sharron Davies and this author note in Unfair Play, the same reconciliation, kindness and the setting aside of any notion of statute of limitation, granted to one American man is still denied to generations of women abused and wronged in Olympic sport, on IOC watch and with Olympic licences and permissions at the very heart of the crimes and injustices committed against them.
The women and those who have supported their campaigns for justice dating back to the GDR doping era received a boost this past. Ironically, just as all the oxygen in the room was being taken up by the latest Chinese doping scandal, a leading sports lawyer who works in arbitration in Olympic sport, concluded a three-part series on the lack of IOC action on the darkest chapter of athlete harm in the Movement’s history with this:
“Injustices can’t be too far gone to warrant rectification. At times since the Moscow Olympics, and including during a British documentary filmed more than 25 years ago, Petra Schneider herself expressed support for the concept that Sharron Davies should be recognised as actually having won the Olympic 400m individual medley at the 1980 Olympics and be awarded the medal which Schneider has buried in her wardrobe, an artefact of shame.
That the IOC has produced no solution isn’t satisfactory. In a strict legal sense, the East German athletes didn’t dope. But then again, of course they did.
Darren Kane, Sports Lawyer – see foot of this editorial for link to his SMH columns on the dilemma of dealing with the GDR doping era – image: Canadian Nancy Garapick, flanked by gold and silver medallists from the GDR Ulrike Richter and Birgit Treiber – it was the same podium for the 100 and 200m backstroke at the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games – courtesy of NTCLArchive SchwimmSport collection
Olympic rights holders and partners have long been able to have a word on the inside to see if ambition A or B might be achievable for those investing in the Movement that stands on the shoulders of athletes and those who work with them to create the biggest multi-sports show on Earth.
Perhaps NBC could now have a word with Thomas Bach and Co on behalf of Shirley (who was not surly but honest) Babashoff, Wendy Boglioli, Kim Peyton, Jill Sterkel, Karen Moe, their teammates and all the women (and a fair few men, too) who faced the steroid-fuelled victims and winners of East Germany’s since proven, undeniable and overwhelmingly recorded and catalogued doping factory at the 1976, 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games (and much in between) and help manifest the justice afforded to one man into a reality for generations of women who deserve no less.
Let’s remind ourselves….
The Saga of Jim Thorpe & His Stockholm 1912 Gold Medals
Jim Thorpe was an accomplished US athlete who won two gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. It came to light one year later that the Native American had accepted a modest fee for playing minor-league baseball during the 1909-1910 season. Consequently, the International Olympic Committee retroactively stripped him of his medals for having accepted a mere $25-per-week fee.
The first campaign to reinstate Thorpe’s medals and Olympic champion titles began in 1914. Silence from the IOC followed, and Thorpe, also known by his tribal name Wa-Ho_Thuk (meaning Bright Path), died on March 28,1953, without ever seeing anything come to fruition.
Another three decades passed before the call for justice was acted upon. In 1982, the IOC offered a bizarre compromise. They gave duplicate gold medals to Thorpe’s family, but his sole-champion status was not recognized nor were his Olympic records reinstated because it would have “looked a little strange to have two winners but only one with the record.”
Nor, it might be added, was there any official acknowledgement of there key reason why the “Amateur Rule” was, rightly, set aside seven decades after the fact and at a time when an Amateur Rule was still being enforced (ironically, far more rigidly by western democracies than the communist Soviet bloc nations because the state ran sport.
To acknowledge the truth, the IOC would have had to have admitted that it did not follow other prevailing rules and terms of engagement with the Swedish hosts of the 1912 Games: the IOC took action against Thorpe after the deadline by which any appeals against results had to be received by the Games organisers. The IOC, it might be said, did not comply with its own ‘statute of limitations’ at the time.
So, shared gold it was, in 1982 because a fence hat to be sat on and neither Thorpoe nor his opponents could be denied.
Fast-forward another four decades and we have a third decision. In 2020, a Bright Path Strong petition with 75,000 signatures advocated declaring Thorpe the outright winner of the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon. Negotiations and agreements with relevant NOCs and family members of deceased athletes finally led to the 2022 decision to return all of Thorpe’s awards and honours.
That, of course, meant changing the result for the other athletes in those events three times over during that same 110-year period.
After the reversal, the Bright Path Strong organization, with the help of American IOC member Anita DeFrantz, contacted the Swedish Olympic Committee and the family of Hugo Wieslander, the Swedish athlete who had been elevated to decathlon gold medalist in 1913 after Thorpe had been stripped of his medals.
“They confirmed that Wieslander himself had never accepted the Olympic gold medal allocated to him, and had always been of the opinion that Jim Thorpe was the sole legitimate Olympic gold medalist,” the IOC said.
That same declaration was received from the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports, whose athlete, Ferdinand Bie, was named as the gold medalist when Thorpe was stripped of the pentathlon title in 1912, the IOC confirmed. Bie had no objections: by then, he was long gone, having passed away in 1961. It was agreed on his behalf, as was the case with Wieslander, who passed away in 1976.
World Athletics also amended its records and Bright Path Strong praised the IOC for their posthumous “setting of the record straight” about the Native American athlete.
At the time of the announcement, IOC president Thomas Bach said:
“We welcome the fact that, thanks to the great engagement of Bright Path Strong, a solution could be found. This is a most exceptional and unique situation, which has been addressed by an extraordinary gesture of fair play from the National Olympic Committees concerned.”
Thomas Bach – image: The Jim Thorpe petition and story at Bright Path
In comparison to the GDR doping scandal, it is fair to conclude that the Thorpe debacle was not entirely unique nor exceptional, the amateur rule having mangled the hopes and dreams of many athletes down the years.
Where Jim Thorpe is today deemed to have broken one Olympic rule (which could not stand because the IOC missed a deadline but took four decades to acknowledge it), GDR athletes, under state control, broke two: it paid its winners in money and kind, breaking the amateur rule that was enforced on others at the time; and it systematically doped its athletes.
Also fair to note that the IOC used the failures of the 1970s and 80s to enforce and reinforce anti-doping rules, at a cost of hundreds of millions down the decades and yet at the same time …
Olympic leaders, then and now, have consistently turned a blind eye to the overwhelming, indisputable evidence of the GDR State Research Plan 14:25 doping program that flowed from 1990 onwards. If the confessions of one of the key architects and administrators of East German doping, Manfred Höppner, in Stern Magazin were not enough, by the end of the Germany doping trials in 2000, all the evidence the world could ever need was in the public domain.
It was soon after that the IOC started citing “statute of limitations” as their excuse for inaction even though the only statute relevant in Olympic jurisdiction was to be found in a rule that the IOC itself has always had the power to review and change to take account of extenuating, extraordinary and excoriating circumstances.
The fact is that the IOC turned a wilful blind eye to all the excellent work and advocacy of Brigitte Berendonk, Prof. Werner Franke, anti-doping warriors such as Michele Verroken (SportIntegrity) in the UK, and many others – not to mention the acts of courage shown by GDR athletes who brought their stories and memories to court, some alongside their disabled children, in witness against doctors, coaches and others.
Even the appeals by athletes such as Davies and those representing Americans noting the vast pile of mounting evidence, complete with names, doses, dates, doctors’ orders, spy names, confessions and much else led the IOC to conclude: just too tricky. No apology was given, just a “we regret …” line that added salt to open wounds.
An apology might have acknowledged that at the heart of the state’s secret doping program was an IOC-accredited laboratory. And yet, the IOC took no responsibility, accepted no accountability.
Of late, I’ve often been told that one of the barriers to any reconciliation and recognition process is the risk of legal action against the IOC from former GDR athletes who would object to joint recognition (no campaign is advocating stripping victims of their rewards). In 2024, I imagine any legal threat the IOC may fear would come from the opposite direction, without a shadow of a doubt.
Olympic bosses can shape the past and future in whichever way they choose, as illustrated by Jim Thorpe’s story and, indeed, the precedent set by the IOC itself when it launched the Take the Podium program to honour athletes elevated when retrospective testing of samples unearths cheating.
The GDR doping scandal was life-changing for many thousands of female athletes and significant numbers of male athletes throughout the 1970s and 80s. It also sent a message to athletes that if they wanted a chance of winning in international competition, they would have to cheat.
Moreover, those who chose to use illegal measures to win at any cost had two reasons to feel reassured: as long as they were not caught, their acts would go unpunished; and, even if the offence was truly and catastrophically massive, there would be no consequence if the truth was unveiled.
Thorpe, Wilful Blindness & Other Lessons For The IOC
The Jim Thorpe case should tell the IOC and its investors and partners to think again when it comes to the biggest case of injustice in Olympic sport.
The lack of action that continues to impact the lives of those who endured and survived the doping scandals of the 70s and 80s is one of the prime examples of how Olympic group-think, and its tendency to turn a blind eye to inconvenient truth, impacts the lives of athletes despite the conventions, charters and rules that were designed to ensure Fair Play and conventional sportsmanship.
Every IOC and Olympic sports leader – and everyone ever penalised for falling foul of integrity standards, including the WADA Code, should take the time to read Prof. Margaret Heffernan‘s excellent book Willful Blindness. The theme of her message runs like a red thread through swimming history… and the term Willful Blindness is a term covered in law… a short insight:
Australian Michelle Ford‘s gold in the 800m freestyle at the Moscow 1980 Games sits alongside a bronze and a fourth place behind two and three East Germans on steroids. She concludes Turning The Tide, the book we worked on together, with a call to the IOC and International Sports Federations such as World Aquatics, to “reallocate” medals and “re-establish the record books from the Montreal 1976, Moscow 1980 and Seoul 1988 Olympic Games”.
Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, was asked to write the forward to the book and in doing so, he praised Ford’s advocacy in “the fight against doping” and further noted that “here continuing fight to right the wrongs of the era in which she competed highlights her amazing tenacity and … fighting spirit…”.
Fine words. I asked the IOC when we might see the deeds. Officially, they had nothing to add. In a side note they shared an in-the-room qualifier: Bach was just writing some nice words for a “friend” and hadn’t read the whole book …
He would not have needed to. Bach became an IOC member in 1991, the year after Höppner’s confessions in Stern in the IOC-president-to-be’s native German language. There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that Thomas Bach, a qualified lawyer, would have been aware of the high-tide of evidence rising on its way to the start of doping trials in 1998, long before any relevant statute of limitations would have ended. For him not to have been aware of it would have been negligent in my opinion.
So. Deeds. They need to be done and as Davies, Boglioli and many others have noted in one set of words or another: “We should not have to die before seeing justice done.”
They are right. Time the IOC reached for the wisdom of the Rev. Desmond Tutu, a man praised to the hilt by the IOC when he passed away even though what he advocated is precisely what the IOC has denied generations of female athletes and continues to do so as Paris 2024 approaches and all blazers get set to boast that parity of sexes has been achieved for the first time in Olympic history because the numbers of male and female athletes (not events, opportunities, places at the top table etc) match.
Here’s the relevance of the Rev. Tutu in a story of Olympic wilful blindness:
Truth, Reconciliation & The Benefits Of Forgiveness That Flows
In a reference to the Truth & Reconciliation Commission work in South Africa in the midst of post-apartheid healing, the Reverend Desmond Tutu noted that “The process is simple, but it is not easy.”
“Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning. Forgiveness is nothing less than the way we heal the world. We heal the world by healing each and every one of our hearts. The process is simple, but it is not easy. Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.”
Desmond Tutu
And here are the words of Husain Al-Musallam, president of World Aquatics, that raised the prospect of reconciliation and healing when I approach he’d him to relay the message from Sharron Davies on reconciliation and justice on behalf of all those athletes impacted by the events ion the 1970s and 80s after the reformed FINA finally agreed to strip Dr. Lothar Kipke of the honour it bestowed ion the GDR doping menace in 1986 for his “services to swimming”:
“Fina understands the concerns of athletes who have competed against others subsequently proved to have cheated.
“Athletes work their entire lives for a mere chance to compete for a medal, yet alone win one. So when athletes are denied the reward they worked so hard to achieve, Fina must do everything it can to right this wrong.
“Fina is committed to building aquatic sport on the strongest possible foundations. This is why Fina has begun a wide-ranging process of reform, part of which is the proposal – already approved by the Fina Bureau – for the creation of an independent Aquatics Integrity Unit.
“Once established, the independent Aquatics Integrity Unit will investigate the matter to determine what recourse may be taken in support of Ms Davies and all similarly-situated other aquatics athletes.”
Husain Al-Musallam – image: Image – What it means: ‘East German doping: ‘My father was heartbroken back then and the drug injustice still tortures him at 85″ – The Times (screenshot)
The Integrity Unity is up and running but Al-Musallam had a change of heart and believed that the job should and could be done without reference to an independent Integrity checks. The evidence and overwhelming truth that was accepted a long time ago was good enough.
The barrier to action was IOC consent and while that has not been given on an official level, IOC vice-president John Coates has said that the IOC would not object to any decision of international sports federations to act in their own jurisdictions (world championship medals and so forth). Of course, Bach has only gone as far as he has in word, not deed. The status-quo stalemate remains.
Back to the wisdom of Tutu and the lessons learned from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Process:
When the Reverend Desmond Tutu passed away at 90 a day after Christmas Day in 2021, the IOC was among those paying plaudits and pointing to him as a beacon of hope and inspiration. What did not appear in the Olympic messaging was this from the South African Anglican bishop and theologian who played a key role in bringing apartheid to an end in his country:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
Desmond Tutu – image: the elephant in the room with its foot on the tail of a mouse – photo by Craig Lord, courtesy of “The Mystery of Banksy”, a celebration of the work of the British street artist
With that in mind, here are three excellent places for those Integrity and IOC officials to start on their journey towards deeper understanding of why ‘statute of limitations’ is entirely irrelevant, just as it was in the case of Jim Thorpe, as far as the IOC was concerned:
- “No Future Without Forgiveness” – by Desmond Tutu
- … couple 1 with this key sentiment and explanation of how the process works, from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Volume One:
“Indeed, if the key concepts of confession, forgiveness and reconciliation are central to the message of this report, it would be wonderful if one day some representative of the British/English community said to the Afrikaners, “We wronged you grievously. Forgive us.” And it would be wonderful too if someone representing the Afrikaner community responded, “Yes, we forgive you – if you will perhaps let us just tell our story, the story of our forebears and the pain that has sat for so long in the pit of our stomachs unacknowledged by you.”
Extract from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Volume One
3. 60 Minutes: Desmond Tutu and the Reconciliation Commission
Reconciliation In “Situations of Injustice”
The Rev. Tutu summed up the core purpose of any truth and reconciliation process with the words “situations of injustice”. Before we apply that to women’s swimming and the matters heading for consideration at the Aquatics Integrity Unit, it is worth noting the following from the South African report: ” … all truth commissions have their limitations. In the words of Michael Ignatieff:
All that a truth commission can achieve is to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse. In Argentina, its work has made it impossible to claim, for example, that the military did not throw half- dead victims in the sea from helicopters. In Chile, it is no longer permissible to assert in public that the Pinochet regime did not dispatch thousands of entirely innocent people…
Michael Ignatieff. Image: Red warning on the water – by Patrick B. Kraemer
Situations of injustice.
The official record of Olympic sport contains a massive lie. It’s time the victims and the victims of victims were granted reconciliation, allowed to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and acknowledge their hurt and harm and for the truth to finally be a part of what would be an Olympic Movement entitled to claim that it works on the basis of integrity, Jim Thorpe through Paris 2024 and beyond.
The Conclusions Of A Sports Lawyer
We end with the conclusion to an insightful three-part feature from Sports lawyer Darren Kane in the Sydney Morning Herald.
A member of the Legal Committee of FINA for five years until 2022, Kane is an Arbitrator and Mediator for the National Sports Tribunal of Australia and a member of the Legal Aid Panel at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
After setting out the history of the GDR doping years and looking at legal considerations down the years, Kane turns to why the IOC needs to pull down the blackout blinds and let the light in.
His conclusion aligns with what Sharron Davies, Wendy Boglioli and Michelle Ford, the founders of FAIR (Females Athletes For Integrity and Resolution) and many who have shared their message for decades have long asked for: a reconciliation and recognition process in which the GDR athletes would not be stripped of medals but in which there would be a reallocation of medals and issue of re-ordered result sheets that recognise the changes and the history of what happened.
Kane concludes:
The Court of Arbitration for Sport jurisprudence dictates that extensions of the WADA 10-year limitation period can be dealt with in the context of the principles of the laws of the country where the interested sports authority is domiciled. This brings into play Swiss law because the IOC is based in Lausanne.
“The Swiss Code of Obligations applies. Generally, breach of contract claims in Switzerland expire after 10 years. Although parties agree to suspend or waive limitation periods, Swiss law says this usually can only be achieved to buy another 10 years. Assuming the IOC wanted to do something, these laws represent a barrier…
“So what could be done? One idea is the establishment of something akin to a special reparations commission that would operate as a forum for athletes affected by the East German doping scandal to petition for redress in specific cases.
“That IOC could be conferred with structured complaint, investigative, conciliation, mediation and adjudicative functions and powers to consider specific cases, with the consent of athletes who represented the GDR.
“Even if just a fraction of the 489 medals were eventually reallocated, it might be a worthwhile and tremendously cathartic exercise in the interests of sport.
“Injustices can’t be too far gone to warrant rectification. At times since the Moscow Olympics, and including during a British documentary filmed more than 25 years ago, [Petra] Schneider herself expressed support for the concept that [Sharron] Davies should be recognised as actually having won the Olympic 400m individual medley at the 1980 Olympics and be awarded the medal which Schneider has buried in her wardrobe, an artefact of shame.
“That the IOC has produced no solution isn’t satisfactory. In a strict legal sense, the East German athletes didn’t dope. But then again, of course, they did.“
The reparations commission Kane suggests need not be set up to establish the truth but simple to organise due process so that International federations and NOCs can get on with the business of honouring and recognising those who would be elevated on or onto the Olympic podium.
There should be no need for a long and drawn out process. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, written into law in 1995 and at work in 1996 released the first five volumes of its final report on Oct. 29, 1998, and the remaining two volumes of the report on March 21, 2003.
In numbers: The Commission found there’d been 7,000 political deaths under Apartheid between 1948 and 1989. More than 19,050 people had been victims of gross human rights violations. An additional 2,975 victims were identified through applications for amnesty. A total of 5,392 amnesty applications were refused; only 849 out of 7,111 applications were granted.
A reconciliation and recognition process focussed on the GDR doping era need not join the case of Jim Thorpe in the book of Olympic races that took far too long. Within an hour of a reparations commission being established, I could hand over an entire reworked list of Olympic finals and even names of would-be qualifiers for all three Games affected in swimming, for example.
Worth noting this, too: the tired excuse of ‘but what about the Russians and Chinese and others’ is a red herring. Yes, there was, doubtless, cheating going on in other places far and wide, but no, suspicions elsewhere do not and should not prevent facing the truth we know because a state wrote down and recorded its own crime, because athletes gave witness in court, and because we have a very obvious picture of false dominance in specific places, among other factors.