“Shining Path”, the greatest athlete in the world

Legend tells how, upon his birth on a May day at the end of the nineteenth century, the sun illuminated the inside of his parents' house with a trail of light. For this reason they called it Wa-Tho-Huk, “Shining Path” in the language of the Sac and Fox Indian nation. However, he also had a "white" name, Jim Thorpe, because his father was half Irish.

Coming into the world on a Native American reservation in late 19th-century Oklahoma usually meant living by small, hand-to-mouth jobs. Thorpe, however, had another destiny written in his Indian name and, above all, he had his muscles. The young Shining Path was an extraordinary, natural athlete, capable of excelling in all disciplines, from American football to baseball to track and field. He was a perfect athlete, but above all an unconventional character in an America that launched a campaign of assimilation of the natives who survived the massacres of the previous century as Tommaso Giagni recounts in the book dedicated to the legendary figure of Jim Thorpe, "Grabbing a Shadow" ( Minimum fax, 2023, Euro 16, pp. 210. Also Ebook).

And an elusive shadow for his opponents Thorpe truly was at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, the fifth of the modern era. Jim won the gold medal in the decathlon and pentathlon specialties, tough competitions where it was not the specialist who emerged, but the most complete athlete of all. And Thorpe was that athlete, without a shadow of a doubt: in the pentathlon he dominated, winning four out of five trials, while in the decathlon he placed in the top four in all ten trials.

During the awards ceremony, the King of Sweden, Gustav V, greeted him by saying: «Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world». And the young Red Indian, who knew very little about sovereigns and ceremonials, simply replied: "Thank you, Mr. King", then he returned to America, loaded with medals and glory.

In his homeland he found fame waiting for him... and, above all, the envy of others. Newspapers spread the news that Thorpe had received money to play baseball before the Olympics. Anyone who took money to play sports was a professional and could not participate in the Olympic Games, which were reserved for the "pure", amateurs.

The sum in question was paltry, a few dollars, and Thorpe deluded himself that sincerity was enough to solve everything. He wrote: «I hope to be partially excused by the fact that I was only a poor Indian student and did not know enough about all these things. In fact, I didn't know I was doing anything wrong, because I was doing the same things that many students like me had done, simply by not using their real name."

Such sincere naivety was too much for the Olympic world, full of hypocritical officials and athletes who secretly pocketed money. The sentence was final and deprived the greatest athlete in the world of his medals and victories. Thorpe had no choice but to truly throw himself into professional sport, playing American football and baseball until he was well into his forties. At the end of the 1920s his parable as an athlete declined, the money quickly ran out during the great economic crisis of 1929 and the jobs became increasingly thankless and sporadic. What could a half-breed Indian born on a reservation expect, after all?

Thorpe began drinking more and more and ended up living in a squalid trailer not far from Los Angeles. Not even the decision of American sports journalists to proclaim him, in 1950, the best athlete of the first half of the 20th century did anything to cheer him up. Nor was the creation of the film “Jim Thorpe-All American” (in Italian, “Copper Skin”) directed by Michael Curtiz and with the star Burt Lancaster as the protagonist in 1951. Thorpe didn't make any money because he sold the rights to his life in 1931 for $1,500.

He was now living on charity when he died in 1953, destroyed by alcohol and by regret at having been considered "someone who had cheated". The governor of Oklahoma denied permission to erect a monument to him and so his remains were purchased by a small Pennsylvania town, Mauch Chunk. The authorities were looking for a way to attract tourists, they renamed their town Jim Thorpe and bet on Shining Path. It was a lucky bet: thirty years after his death, in 1983, the International Olympic Committee rehabilitated Thorpe and returned the medals won in 1912 to his children. That day, finally, the sun returned to its place, making the the path of the greatest athlete in the world.