Jim Thorpe was stripped of his Olympic medals because he was found to have violated the amateurism rules of the Olympics by having played minor league semi-professional baseball for money before the 1912 Games. This was against the Olympic rules at the time, which required athletes to be amateurs and not have received payment for playing sports. Although many college athletes who played semi-professional baseball did so under aliases to keep their amateur status, Thorpe signed his real name. The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) retroactively stripped his amateur status, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) consequently stripped him of his medals and removed his records from the official books in 1913. The decision was also influenced by the era's strict and elitist views on amateurism, and it was made without allowing Thorpe an appeal. Decades later, Thorpe's medals were posthumously reinstated as sole winner of the 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon in 2022.
