You gotta love that International Olympic Committee. Even with all the grifting, bribe-taking and looking the other way taking up so much of its time, occasionally it gets around to doing the right thing.
I mean, just look what it did for Jim Thorpe.
What the Olympic poobahs did was reinstate his gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon, and it only took them 110 years to do it. This is because Thorpe won those medals at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Subsequently, he was stripped of his medals, and his name erased from the record books, because Thorpe also was playing professional baseball at the time.
What playing baseball -- minor-league baseball -- for money had to do with the Olympic pentathlon and decathlon remains a mystery, of course. But it didn't matter. Thorpe took money for playing a sport totally unrelated to his Olympic events, so he was out.
This is what passed for logic in 1912. And it did so right up until the Soviets started winning all those medals with what amounted to professionals, which the IOC conveniently overlooked because by that time excluding the Soviets would have been like starting the Indianapolis 500 with a field of 15. Too much would be missing, and viewership would plummet as a result.
Now, of course, virtually everyone is the Soviets, in the sense that they're all professionals. They make money directly from their status as Olympic athletes, which Thorpe never did. Even the IOC eventually recognized the absurdity of continuing to punish Thorpe for something that no longer violates the Olympic ideal, and hasn't for decades.
So, good on the IOC folks. It took them long enough, but, hey, they're the IOC. Stuff just takes longer to dawn on 'em.
Now if only Major League Baseball would reinstate Shoeless Joe Jackson, having decided betting on baseball is OK here in the enlightened 2020s.
Baby steps.
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