A citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics.

Official IOC records still listed Thorpe as co-champion in decathlon and pentathlon until 2022, when it was decided to restore him as the sole champion in both events.

After his Olympic success in 1912, which included a record score in the decathlon, he added a victory in the All-Around Championship of the Amateur Athletic Union.

He was married three times and had eight children, including Grace Thorpe, an environmentalist and Native rights activist, before suffering from heart failure and dying in 1953.

The Associated Press ranked him as the "greatest athlete" from the first 50 years of the 20th century, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted him as part of its inaugural class in 1963.

[5] Thorpe said in a note to The Shawnee News-Star in 1943 that he was born May 28, 1888, "near and south of Bellemont – Pottawatomie County – along the banks of the North Fork River ... hope this will clear up the inquiries as to my birthplace.

[16] Thorpe began his athletic career at Carlisle in 1907 when he walked past the track and, still in street clothes, beat all the school's high jumpers with an impromptu 5-ft 9-in jump.

In 1912, Carlisle won the national collegiate championship largely as a result of Thorpe's efforts: he scored 25 touchdowns and 198 points during the season, according to CNN's Greg Botelho.

In the Olympic trials held at Celtic Park in New York, his all-round ability stood out in all these events and so he earned a place on the team that went to Sweden.

[19] Even more remarkably, because someone had stolen his shoes just before he was due to compete, he found a mismatched pair of replacements, including one from a trash can, and won the gold medal wearing them.

Along with the two gold medals, Thorpe also received two challenge prizes, which had been donated by King Gustav V of Sweden for the decathlon and Czar Nicholas II of Russia for the pentathlon.

[48][49] Thorpe biographer Kate Buford suggests that the story is apocryphal, as she believes that such a comment "would have been out of character for a man who was highly uncomfortable in public ceremonies and hated to stand out.

Competing against Bruno Brodd of the Irish American Athletic Club and John L. Bredemus of Princeton University, he won seven of the ten events contested and came in second in the remaining three.

[58] In late January 1913, the Worcester Telegram reported that Thorpe had played semi-professional baseball before the Olympics, and other U.S. newspapers followed up the story.

[60] College players, in fact, regularly spent summers playing professionally in order to earn some money, but most used aliases, unlike Thorpe.

[18] Although the public did not seem to care much about Thorpe's past,[61] the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and especially its secretary James Edward Sullivan, took the case very seriously.

[62] Thorpe wrote a letter to Sullivan, in which he admitted playing professional baseball:[48] I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things.

In the "double no-hitter" between Fred Toney of the Reds and Hippo Vaughn of the Chicago Cubs, Thorpe drove in the winning run in the 10th inning.

During the Great Depression in particular, he had various jobs, among others as a movie actor, mostly as an extra, usually playing an American Indian in Westerns,[99] starting with the 1931 serial Battling with Buffalo Bill.

[100] In the 1932 comedy Always Kickin', Thorpe was prominently cast in a speaking part as himself, a kicking coach teaching young football players to drop-kick.

[61] At the time Thorpe won his gold medals, not all Native Americans were recognized as U.S. citizens (the U.S. government had frequently demanded that they make concessions to adopt European-American ways to receive such recognition).

Armed with this support and evidence from 1912 proving that Thorpe's disqualification had occurred after the 30-day time period allowed by Olympics rules, they succeeded in making the case to the IOC.

[39] In July 2020, a petition from Bright Path Strong[121][122] began circulating that called upon the IOC to reinstate Thorpe as the sole winner in his events in the 1912 Olympics.

[123][124] The IOC voted to reinstate Thorpe as the sole winner of both events on July 14, 2022, after the National Olympic Committees of Norway and Sweden, representing Bie and Wieslander, had given their approval.

[142] In 2024, President Joe Biden announced that Thorpe would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor given in the United States.

Local officials had asked state legislators for funding, but a bill that included $25,000 for their proposal was vetoed by Governor Johnston Murray.

He claimed that the agreement between his stepmother and Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, borough officials was made against the wishes of other family members, who want him buried in Native American land.

[156] In April 2013, U.S. District Judge Richard Caputo ruled that Jim Thorpe borough amounts to a museum under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act ("NAGPRA"), and therefore is bound by that law.

A lawyer for Bill and Richard Thorpe said the men would pursue the legal process to have their father's remains returned to Sac and Fox land in central Oklahoma.

"[159] On October 5, 2015, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the matter, effectively bringing the legal process to an end.