Mr. Rafer Johnson was born in Hillsboro, Texas but moved to Kingsburg, California at age 9. In high school, he played on the school's football, baseball and Basketball teams. As a versatile athlete, he was attracted to the decathlon after seeing double Olympic Champion Bob Mathias compete and told his coach "I could have beaten most of those guys in that meet". He competed in his first meet in 1954, as a freshman at UCLA. His progress in the event was impressive, and he broke the world record in his fourth competition.

The crown on his career came in 1960, at the Rome Olympics. His most important opponent was Yang Chuan-Kwang. Yang also studied at UCLA, and the two were training together and had become friends, training under UCLA track coach Elvin C. "Ducky" Drake. After nine events, Johnson led Yang, but Yang was thought to be capable of overcoming this gap in the final event, the 1500 m. Johnson however managed to cling on to Yang, and won the gold. At UCLA, Johnson also played basketball under coach John Wooden, and was a starter on the 1959-60 Men's Basketball team. Johnson was named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year in 1958 and won the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States in 1960, breaking that award's color barrier. In 1994, he was elected into the first class of the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame. In 1998, he was named one of ESPN's 100 Greatest North American Athletes of the 20th Century. In 2006, the NCAA named him one of the 100 Most Influential Student Athletes of the past 100 years.

Mr. Jim Thorpe, Sac and Fox (Sauk Wa-Tho-Huk)(May 28, 1888 – March 28, 1953) was an American athlete. Considered one of the most versatile athletes in modern sports, he won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball. He lost his Olympic titles after it was found he was paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus violating the amateur status rules.

Of Native American and European American ancestry, Thorpe grew up in Sac and Fox nation in Oklahoma. He played on several All-American Indian teams throughout his career, and barnstormed as a professional basketball player with a team composed of entirely of Native Americans.

In 1950, Thorpe was named the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century by the Associated Press (AP). In 1999, he was ranked third on the AP list of top athletes of the 20th century.

His professional sports career ended in the years of the Great Depression, and Thorpe struggled to earn a living from then on. He worked several odd jobs, as an Associate, struggled with alcoholism, and living his last years failing health and poverty. In 1983, thirty years after his death, the International Olympic Commission (IOC) restored his Olympic medals to his name.

Both biographies can be found jon http://en.wikipedia.org.