Jim Thorpe: The Greatest Athlete and the Fight for His Medals
By Daniel R. Whitfield
Length4h 19m
About this audiobook
Bright Path. That is what Wa-Tho-Huk means, the name given to a boy born in a small frame house on the Sac and Fox allotment south of Prague, Indian Territory, after a thunderstorm came up the Canadian River valley in the spring of 1887. That February, Congress had passed the Dawes Act and begun cutting the reservations into parcels. The boy grew up between the two: a Sac and Fox name, and a government certain it knew better.
The world would call him Jim Thorpe. At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, under Pop Warner, he led the football team that beat Harvard in 1911, and at the Stockholm Olympics the next summer he won both the pentathlon and the decathlon. He came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York. Then, in January 1913, a newspaper revealed that he had played two summers of minor-league baseball in North Carolina for a few dollars a game, and the medals were taken away.
He went on to play outfield for the New York Giants and to star in the professional football that became the NFL, and after his death in 1953 his family and supporters kept up the argument over amateurism and race. In October 1982 the International Olympic Committee put his name back in the record books as co-champion.
He had been dead for twenty-nine years.
Audiobook details
GenreBiography and Memoir
Length4 hrs 19 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: Wa-Tho-Huk: The Path Lit by Lightning
2Chapter 2: Carlisle: An Experiment in Steel and Grief
3Chapter 3: The 1911 Season: Carlisle Against the Ivy
4Chapter 4: Stockholm, 1912: The Games of the Fifth Olympiad
5Chapter 5: The Parade and the Complaint
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6Chapter 6: Barnstorming: Baseball, Football, and the Dollars That Would Not Wait
7Chapter 7: The Long Barnstorming Years: The New York Giants and the Gridiron Legend
8Chapter 8: The Fight for the Medals Begins
9Chapter 9: The Reckoning: Amateurism, Race, and the Rules
10Chapter 10: October 1982: The Medals Come Home
11Chapter 11: The Greatest Athlete: Legacy and the Nations That Remember
12Chapter 12: The Path Lit by Lightning: What the Medals Mean
13About the Author
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