why were jim thorpe's medals taken away

Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals were taken away because it was discovered that he had played minor league baseball for money before the 1912 Olympics, which violated the amateurism rules in effect at the time. Olympic athletes then were required to be amateurs, meaning they could not have received payment for playing sports. Thorpe had played professional baseball under his own name, which disqualified him from Olympic competition retroactively. The Amateur Athletic Union stripped him of his amateur status, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) subsequently took away his gold medals in 1913, shortly after his victory. This was despite the fact that many athletes at the time circumvented these rules by using aliases, and Thorpe claimed he was unaware of the rule violation. The decision was also influenced by the attitudes of powerful officials and was seen by some as unjust and hypocritical. Many years later, in 1982, the IOC restored Thorpe's medals as a gesture of fairness after evidence showed that the disqualification process had not followed proper rules, and in 2022 they reinstated him as the sole champion in both the pentathlon and decathlon events from the 1912 Games.