Jim Thorpe's dominance in football was matched by his records on Carlisle's track team, where he ran sprints, hurdles, and distance races, high jumped and broad jumped, and competed in the javelin, discus, and shot put, often averaging six first-place finishes in a single meet. Selected for the United States Olympic team in 1912, he traveled to Sweden for the Games and entered both the Pentathlon and the Decathlon. Although many athletes were exhausted by the Decathlon alone, Thorpe finished first in both events, tripled the score of the Pentathlon runner-up, and finished 688 points ahead of his nearest Decathlon competitor. His performances were so exceptional that it took forty years of improved diets, training procedures, hurdling techniques, and equipment to break all of his times and distances, and his sweep of both events could never be repeated after the Pentathlon was dropped from the Olympic program after 1924. At the close of the Fifth Olympiad, King Gustav V of Sweden awarded Thorpe his gold medals and declared him "the greatest athlete in the world." Within a year, however, it was disclosed that Thorpe had played baseball for pay three years earlier, two dollars per game, and the Amateur Athletic Union ruled him a professional, ordered him to surrender his medals, and struck his name from the record books despite widespread public belief that any violation had been accidental rather than intentional.
