Coincidence? Or... · 5:58am Dec 29th, 2015

Okay, so I visited my folks this Holiday Season, who have recently moved into a little town known as Jim Thorpe. It's a nifty former coal-mining town tucked away in the hills of Pennsylvania named for the legendary Olympian athlete who is buried there. We took a little jaunt round town to see the sites, one of which is the memorial and final resting place of Jim Thorpe himself... where we came across this:

A sculpture donated to the Jim Thorpe memorial by a local vocational school in the late 1990s.

Look familiar?

Like our beloved cyan pegasus, Jim Thorpe was athletically in a league of his own. Despite some legal controversy, many of the records he set in the 1912 Olympics still stand today, over a century later. He competed back-to-back in both the Pentathalon and Decathalon--events that by themselves left most athletes exhausted--and became the first and only person in history to claim the coveted Gold medal in both events, finishing hundreds of points ahead of his closest competitor.

After the Olympics, Jim didn't exactly go on to be the Captain of every sports team, but that didn't stop him from playing every major sport he felt like. Baseball, Basketball, American Football; Jim Thorpe played them all, kicking ass and taking names just as he had in his college days, where he played under the famous Coach Pop Warner (for whom the Pop Warner football league is named).

It's also been said that he could run the 100-meter dash in--get this--ten seconds flat.

Insane enough for you yet?

Here's the kicker... Jim Thorpe, being part Native American, had a Native American name: Wa-Tho-Huk. The meaning is sometimes translated as "bright path" or "path lit by a great flash of lightning". The meaning behind his Native American name is what inspired the sculpture above.

Now, this might just be me thinking out loud here, but couldn't one consider a rainbow to be, figuratively, a path made of bright light? Have we not just recently been reminded that Rainbow Dash's famous Sonic Rainboom as a filly was, in effect, a flash of lightning that lit the path upon which she and her closest friends would walk into the future?

Food for thought, my friends...