Growing up, certain things were understood in our household. You were not to play with the tint control on the TV, no matter how funny people looked with green faces. The dog slept outside, no matter how sad he looked when you stared out the window at him. And you were not, under any circumstances, to interrupt my father when he was watching “Jim Thorpe, All-American”.

Non stereotypical media depictions of American Indians were rare (the Bugs Bunny cartoon depicting an American Indian slithering on the ground like a serpent was still in circulation, last time I looked), and a film with a real life American Indian hero was as rare a thing as you could imagine.

Jim Thorpe came to an unhappy end, because of a man named Avery Brundage.

Brundage was a certified elitist, one who insisted that Olympic athletes were to be purely amateur. Ensuring that only those with the copious free time it takes to train be allowed to represent their nation in international competition. So when a poor man like Thorpe was discovered to have played semi-professional baseball, why of course he had to be stripped of his medals, his records, his dignity.

This was far from the only example of Brundage’s prejudice in his role as president of the International Olympic Committee.

In 1936, Germany hosted the Olympic games. Brundage is believed to have played a part in expelling two Jewish athletes, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, from the USA team. Brundage praised the Nazis, and was rewarded with a contract to build the German embassy in the USA.

At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos of the USA took first and third respectively in the 200 meter race. At the medal ceremony, Smith and Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute (The second place winner, Austrailan Peter Norman, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge to show his support for Smith and Carlos. Good onya, Peter).

Brundage responded by ordering Smith and Carlos to be suspended by the USA team and expelled from the Olympic village. The US Olympic committee refused, so Brundage threatened to expel the entire USA track team, and the USOC relented.

Not content with mere racism, Brundage also campaigned for the removal of women from the Olympic games. in 1936 he was quoted as saying “I am fed up to the ears with women as track and field competitors… her charms sink to something less than zero. As swimmers and divers, girls are [as] beautiful and adroit as they are ineffective and unpleasing on the track.”

Despite reaching old age, experience did nothing to lessen Brundage’s bigotry. Every single attempt to redress the injustice done to Jim Thorpe was blocked by Brundage, and after Brundage died in Germany in 1975, it was revealed that he was the one who informed the IOC of Thorpe’s brief semi-pro career. A likely contributing factor to Brundage’s campaign of petty spite against Thorpe was the fact that Brundage finished sixth in the 1912 Olympics pentathlon and fifteenth in the decathlon behind Thorpe.

Avery Brundage, art collector, aristocrat, and a massive asshat.