Over a decade ago, I used to share a vacation home in the Poconos in one of the municipalities adjacent to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, so I'm fairly familiar with Jim Thorpe's life story. I've visited his tomb in his namesake town a couple of times, and am sympathetic over his having been stripped of his two Gold Medals for the Decathlon and Pentathlon from the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. That said, I'm giving this supposed "documentary" the lowest rating possible because it was largely a bunch of cheap shots at other prominent Americans, by a bunch of kooks who had their own agenda, spewing their conspiracy theories as fact when they can be disproven with a little simple research. This includes two men who would be among the most iconic US Army generals of World War II in Europe three decades after they were in Jim Thorpe's life.
But first I'll address one of Thorpe's other associates. Avery Brundage was Thorpe's age and was on the 1912 US Decathlon and Pentathlon teams with him in Stockholm, finishing five places behind Thorpe in the Pentathlon and 15 places behind in the Decathlon. He then went on to become president of the American Olympic Committee from1928 to 1948 and then president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972. This "documentary" essentially accuses Brundage of everything bad that happened in Thorpe's life from 1912 onward, from stealing his sneakers in Stockholm (which resulted in Thorpe famously performing the entire games with two mismatched shoes he had scavenged from the trash), to revealing to the press Thorpe's having played baseball semi-professionally which triggered the revocation of his medals, to rejecting every appeal of the revocation while president of the American or International Olymic Committees up to the end of Brundage's tenure at the IOC 19 years after Thorpe's death. Several of Brundage's biographies acknowledge that much of his actions could be interpreted as racist, but no evidence exists that he stole Thorpe's sneakers or ratted him out to the press, and his rejection of the appeals appears simply to be consistent with his belief in adhering to the letter of the law disqualifying professional athletes from the Olympics. Unsubstantiated supposition of some decades-long sore loser grudge rooted in racism is ridiculous.
The next target of the conspiracy theorists is future General of the Army and 34th President of the United States Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower, who as a second-year cadet at West Point played halfback on the varsity football team against Carlisle Indian Industrial School, of which Thorpe was the star athlete, in the fall following the Stockholm Olympics. The "documentary" states as fact that the West Point team and particularly Eisenhower planned not just to outmaneuver Thorpe but to intentionally injure him severely enough to end his athletic career, just because Thorpe was an American Indian, and saying Ike actually admitted to that fact in his memoirs. Then they state that the plan backfired and Thorpe knocked down Ike and injured his knee enough to end his football career. NO SUCH STATEMENT OR ANYTHING RESEMBLING IT EXISTS in ANY of Ike's writings, and the athletic and medical records at West Point document that Ike's knee injury that took him off the football team took place a week later in a game against Tufts University. Also, Jim Thorpe was at least 30 pounds heavier and at least 3 inches taller than Ike, making Ike highly unlikely to be the ideal candidate to permanently cripple him.
The slam against the second iconic World War II Army general was practically irrelevant to the life of Jim Thorpe and clearly included only to present the future general in the worst possible light. George S. Patton was also a US competitor at the Stockholm Olympics, in the MODERN Pentathlon, not to be confused with the Classic Pentathlon in which Thorpe won the Gold. It was thie first time the event was included and was more military in orientation, consisting of horseback riding, fencing, running, swimming and pistol shooting. Patton had graduated from West Point in 1909 and had been on active duty as a cavalry officer since, and was the top contender for the US team. (He was actually a mentor to Eisenhower between the World Wars, until Ike surpassed him in rank in 1942.) The "documentary" paints Patton as a miserable failure at the Olympics, falling far short of his expectations especially in shooting. Absolutely nothing to do with Jim Thorpe except that he was also on the US Olympic Team at Stockholm and won the Gold for the OTHER Pentathlon. In actuality, Patton was the ONLY American competitor, PLACED FIFTH OUT OF 42 PARTICIPANTS, and was the only non-Swedish competitor in the top 7. Here's the kicker: the shooting portion consisted of five shots each at a series of different bullseye paper targets. The judges ruled that two of his shots missed their paper targets completely, but on both targets the four shots were tight enough to put a hole in the center between them which Patton appealed on the basis that the fifth bullet passed through the gap; the fact that the fifth bullet did not put a hole elsewhere on the paper was prima facie evidence that it was more likely that it went through the hole. But the judges turned down the appeal. Had one of the bullets counted, he would have won the Bronze and if both, the Gold.
At least under Eisenhower's command, Patton won the 1944 TOUR DE FRANCE while setting distance and speed records, then only a few months later won the Gold in the Combined Arms Snow Marathon in the 1944 Winter Olympics at Bastogne, Belgium. Both feats cemented his and Ike's place in world history. As Patton himself said, "Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance!"
I can't think of any athlete before or since with anything close to the success of Jim Thorpe in multiple sports and athletics and at his level of competition. He certainly didn't need to make anyone else look bad to make himself look as great as he was, and he certainly doesn't deserve to have anyone stoop so low as to do that ostensibly on his behalf seven decades after his death.
