JIM THORPE - NATIVE AMERICAN AND OLYMPIC ATHLETE

I am in possession of a photo of Jim Thorpe; an early 20th century American Indian and athlete. You can see that he's wearing different socks and shoes. This wasn't a fashion statement. It was the 1912 Olympics, and it seems someone had stolen his shoes. He just happened to find a miss matched pair in a dumpster. One was bigger than the other one, but he made up for the discrepancy by wearing two socks on one foot.

As Paul Harvey was prone to say, there was a rest of the story. The rest of Jim Thorpe’s story is he won gold medals in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics in the decathlon and pentathlon.

We can always discover excuses which keep us from achieving God’s best and brightest for our lives. We can find reasons, or we can have results. It’s one or the other. Jim Thorpe chose results.s, and Jim, an American Indian from Oklahoma represented the U.S. in track and field. On the morning of his competitions, his shoes were stolen. Luckily, Jim ended up finding two shoes in a garbage can. That's the pair that he's wearing in the photo. But one of the shoes was too big, so he had to wear an extra sock. Wearing these shoes, Jim won two gold medals that day.