by Melissa Kacalanos

When athletes go for the gold, they go to Salt Lake City for the Olympics. But when the Coca-Cola company decided to go for the gold, it went to central New York state, to a woodcarver named Jim Thorpe, who makes hand-carved, gold leaf signs.

“The day after New Year’s,” says Thorpe, “I received an e-mail from a fellow who said he needed a carved sign made and delivered to Salt Lake City within the month.” The sign’s destination was the 2002 Winter Olympics, where it is now part of the decorations that have transformed the city for the Olympic festivities. “Andrew Burdick, my contact at Coke, said the sign was stopping people in the street!” Thorpe says proudly.

“About six moths ago I launched my website,” says Thorpe. “That’s where Andy found me. He did a search on the internet looking for carved signs. When he came across mine he liked the work.” The website, www.JimThorpeSigns.com, now shows Thorpe’s Olympic sign, so the public can see it without going to Utah.

Jim Thorpe the woodcarver feels a particular connection to the Olympics, as he shares his name with Jim Thorpe, the athlete. The earlier Jim Thorpe won two gold medals in the Olympics of 1912. As a Native American, he represented both the United States and the Sac and Fox Nation. In 1999, Congress declared him “America’s Athlete of the Century”.

“Of course,” says the modern Jim Thorpe, “I’ve always identified with the original Jim Thorpe, all the more so because I grew up the son of a renowned woodsman and totem pole carver.

“It’s kind of funny, really. I grew up in the dude ranch territory of the Adirondacks. There were horses, rodeos, this dude ranch thing going on. My dad had an antique shop there. He started finding totem poles that had been carved in the teens and the twenties by native people.”

This might seem surprising, as totem poles are traditionally carved by the Native Americans of British Columbia, not those of the Adirondacks. Thorpe explains: “Around the turn of the century, tourists, particularly the neauveau riche, came up to the Adirondacks from New York and asked the native people, ‘Where are the totem poles?’ So they made them and sold them to the tourists, even though they had no connection to the genuine totem poles of the British Columbia Indians. It was Indians carving them, but could it be called a proper tradition? Who knows?”

These arguably traditional totem poles inspired the young Jim Thorpe to carve totem poles himself. “I started woodcarving in my teens,” he says. “It was something that my father was starting to explore, and as a teen, I kind of jumped on board. People would go by on horseback, craning their necks to see what we were doing. We started to realize that we grew up in a cowboy theme park – and we played the Indians.”

Thorpe pursued his interest in woodcarving in college. “I got my bachelor of fine arts in Wood Design at New Paltz in 1984. It was a very rare degree,” he laughs. “In the eighties, art furniture was becoming very popular. The idea was that a functional craft could be integrated into an arts mentality.”

Thorpe used his experience in Native American woodcarving to create his Olympic sign. The snowflake-like design, symbol of the 2002 Winter Olympics, contains elements from Native American weavings. The bottom of the snowflake represents the mountains, the middle, the people, and the top represents the Olympic flame. The background represents a bottle cap, symbolizing the corporate sponsorship which makes the Olympics possible and incidentally keeps numerous artists and reporters fed.

“The opportunity to contribute to the atmosphere of the Games is an honor,” says Thorpe. “They’re about what’s possible when you set your mind to achieve a goal.” In Thorpe’s case, that goal was to create a large and elaborate sign in a very short time, from carving and staining the redwood to embellishing it with 23-carat gold leaf.

“Of course,” says Thorpe, taking the Olympic metaphor and running with it, “What is it you’re going for? The gold! Handling gold every day, actual genuine gold, there’s nothing like it. It never loses its brilliance. You find gold that’s thousands of years old, Egyptian and Greek ornaments as beautiful as they day they were made.”

Time preserves the brilliance of the gold medals, and history records the names and deeds of the athletes, but every Olympics is made possible with the help of countless players, including artists like Jim Thorpe.