Jim Thorpe is “the greatest
athlete of all time. Still. To me, it’s not even a question.” Olympic
historian Bill Mallon
Over 100 years ago, Jim Thorpe competed in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. His crushed the competition. In his first event, the pentathlon, consisted
of five events in one day. Thorpe won four
out of the five events. The 1,500 meter
race he ran almost 5 seconds faster than the competition.
Thorpe's second event, the three day decathlon, was held in a
pouring rain. He began by running the
100-meter dash in 11.2 seconds. It was another 36 years before another Olympian
would equal his time.
The next day Thorpe's shoes went missing. His coach scrounged the trash for a pair of
mismatched shoes. The shoes may have
slowed him down but did not impact his performance. Thrope ran his favorite event, the 110-meter
hurdles in 15.6 seconds. Bob Mathias in
the 1948 Olympics was unable to match it.
On the third day, still wearing mismatched shoes, Thorpe ended the
event by running the 1,500 meter run in 4 minutes 40.1 seconds. It wasn't until 1972 that an Olympian beat
his record. As Neely Tucker of the Washington
Post pointed out, the 2008 Olympic Decathlon Champion, Bryan Clay,
would beat Thorpe's 1,500 by only one second.
His fantastic performance can be attributed to natural ability and
unlike most athletes of his generation, Thorpe trained hard, year around. “I may have had an aversion for work,” Thorpe
said, “but I also had an aversion for getting beat.”
Thorpe became a professional athlete after the Olympics. He would play professionally baseball and football until he was 41 years old.