intruded. Olympians from Finland were anything but pleased by having to participate under the Russian flag. They marched with their own flag at the opening ceremonies, aggravating the Russians.
One year after the Games, Thorpe was stripped of his medals for having broken the amateur code—in 1909 and 1910 he received a small sum of money ($60 a month) for playing semiprofessional baseball.186 Coubertin actually opposed taking away the medals but was outvoted by his fellow IOC members.187 In response, Coubertin wrote an Olympic oath, steeped in the principles of amateurism, that athletes would be required to swear by. “Beside its wonderful moral value,” wrote the Baron, “the athlete’s oath is proving to be the only practical means to put an end to this intolerable state of affairs,” by which he meant “disguised professionalism.”188 The oath was first used at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp.189
A campaign to get Thorpe’s medals restored emerged, and persisted for years. Thorpe’s old rival, Avery Brundage, became ensnared in the controversy as a member of the IOC and eventually as its president. Brundage was barraged with letters from a range of individuals and groups—from the Carlisle Jaycees to the US Senate Committee on Post Office and Civil Service—asking him to return Thorpe’s medals. Florida congressman James A. Haley pointed to French skiers whose commercial connections violated the spirit of amateurism but were still allowed to compete. The Committee for Fair Play for Jim Thorpe sent a telegram imploring him to restore the medals since “Thorpe is an ailing and aging man and return of the medals will bring happiness to a great athlete in the twilight of his career.” A private citizen, H. T. Cooke, wrote, “I am hoping there will be a reconsideration of this ruling before the old Redskin passes on to the Happy Hunting Ground” since “it would be favorably received by the general public.”190 Senator A. S. “Mike” Monroney of Oklahoma reasoned, “I seriously doubt that all of the money that Jim Thorpe earned in his professional career as an athlete measures up to the money that ‘amateurs’ are paid today to play college football, basketball, baseball, run track, or participate in other events, which in many cases qualify them for participation in the Olympic Games.”191
However, through the years Brundage remained unmoved, performing mental gymnastics of Olympian proportions to justify his continued refusal to restore Thorpe’s medals. He informed Senator Monroney that Thorpe’s medals been redistributed to other athletes and that, in any case, Thorpe’s “outstanding record as an athlete in competition remains, and actual possession of the medals would add little to it.”192 He wrote to the sportswriter Grantland Rice, “I doubt if the men who received Thorpe’s medals would give them up”; moreover, the medals were handed out by the Swedish Organizing Committee and “I am very doubtful that they would have any interest in the subject.”193 He told H. T. Cooke that “Olympic Games medals have no particular intrinsic value, since only silver gilt medals are given to the winner.” He then concluded dismissively, “This matter was reviewed by the 1951 Amateur Athletic Union Convention with 300 delegates from all over the United States and it was decided that nothing could be done.”194
But something could be done and eventually was. In 1982, at the behest of USOC president William Simon, the IOC voted to return Thorpe’s gold medals. In a ceremony in early 1983, Juan Antonio Samaranch presented Thorpe’s children with replacement gold medals as well as replica silver medals for each of them.195
It would be conjecture to attribute Brundage’s obstinacy to personal resentment at losing to Thorpe in Stockholm. After all, in one letter he wrote, “Jim Thorpe was one of the greatest athletes of all time, we were on the same Olympic team and I was subsequently American all-around champion, so that I naturally have a very friendly feeling toward him and would be happy to please him if it could be done.”196 In another letter he suggested, “Everyone has great sympathy for Thorpe,” so “instead of wasting time and energy on a couple of medals, whose intrinsic value is probably not more than $3.00 or $4.00 each, that you take up a cash collection for him, to which I and many others will be happy to contribute.”197 More likely Brundage’s opposition to restoring the medals emerged from his dogmatic commitment to amateurism, which for him was “an abstract, fixed quality that does not alter or change from day to day.”198 In the years ahead, Brundage’s “fixed” version of amateurism would be challenged and ultimately overturned.
But the early years of the Games are all about the Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Thanks to his indefatigable vim, the Olympics were destined to be more than just a footnote on the page of history. He had a flair for the symbolic and a knack for the spectacular that lasted to the very end. In his will, he left clear instructions to slice his heart from his chest after he died and entomb it in Olympia. His wish was granted on March 26, 1938, when his heart was ceremoniously ensconced in a marble stele meters from the ancient stadium.199 Still Coubertin’s vision for the Games abounded with contradictions —peace and good will, bound up with sexism, racism, and class privilege. In response, sports-minded feminists and leftists would soon organize viable, vibrant alternatives.
“Will war someday shatter the Olympic framework?” Baron Pierre de Coubertin wondered in 1913. He answered his own question with plenty of bombast: “Olympism did not reappear within the context of modern civilization in order to play a local or temporary role. The mission entrusted to it is universal and timeless. It is ambitious. It requires all space and time.”1 The following summer, however, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, setting off a sequence of events that careened into World War I. Coubertin enlisted in the French military despite his advancing age (he was in his early 50s) and was assigned to the country’s propaganda service. Because the Baron believed the IOC should not be “led by a soldier,” he temporarily handed over the reins to his trusted colleague Baron Godefroy de Blonay.2 Once the war broke out, the IOC moved its headquarters from Paris to Lausanne, in neutral Switzerland.
World War I forced the cancellation of the Sixth Olympiad, which had been scheduled to culminate in 1916 at Berlin. But the Baron proved correct when he maintained that when it came to the Olympic Games, “war can merely delay, not stop, its advancement.”3 Sure enough, the Olympics returned after the Great War, to Antwerp in 1920. Having survived German invasion during the war, Belgian organizers played politics, declining to invite Germany and its wartime allies Austria and Hungary; the IOC looked the other way.4 Germany wouldn’t return to the Olympic fold until 1928. Russia was also absent in 1920 because of its recent revolution and the fighting that ensued.
For the first time, Coubertin’s five-ring Olympic flag flew overhead.5 The flag proved popular with athletes—so popular that many pilfered them as souvenirs. Coubertin wrote, “Unfortunately, the Police were on guard: arrests, trials, consular interventions, followed.”6 Another first: athletes took a symbolic oath, pledging allegiance to the Olympic spirit. Coubertin and the IOC oversaw the proceedings from their headquarters in Switzerland.7
Antwerp organizers had a mere year to prepare for the Olympics. As a consequence, many facilities, like the main stadium, were only partly built, and interest from everyday Belgians was minimal. Coubertin tried to deflect criticism, chalking it up to “a crotchety journalist” here and “a professional spoilsport” there. He insisted that the Games were “held with a mastery, a perfection, and a dignity matched by the strenuous and persevering efforts of its organizers.”8
Perhaps unsurprisingly, nationalism flared up at the Games. After a hard-fought water polo match between England and Belgium, the crowd booed and hissed the British national anthem. The heckling continued as the monarchs in attendance filed out of the arena. British Olympic officials lodged
