Jim Thorpe in Stockholm

Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox athlete from Oklahoma, wins the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Games. The King of Sweden tells him he is the greatest athlete in the world. Thorpe says thanks. The times and distances are not close. He is a football star, a baseball player, and, for two weeks in Sweden, the Olympics in one body.

A year later the medals are stripped because he had played minor-league baseball for money. Amateur rules were a class system with a stopwatch. The IOC restores him, decades later, in pieces. The full restoration takes until 2022.

The paperwork never caught the point. Thorpe is the template for the American all-arounder and the reminder that the Olympic movement’s purity tests were often just a way to keep the wrong kind of greatness off the podium.