The Polish javelin thrower Maria Andrejczyk auctioned off her recently won Olympic silver medal from Tokyo for the treatment of a baby with a heart condition.
She found out on the Internet that the eight-month-old Milosz from Cieszyn in Silesia would need more than 1.5 million zlotys (about 330,000 euros) for heart surgery in the USA, the athlete wrote on Instagram.
Half of this sum had already been raised - Andrejczyk resolved to take over the other half.
"It didn't take long to think about it, it's the first fundraiser I've been in and I knew it was the right one," she wrote. “A medal is just an object, but it can be of great value to others and save lives.” The athlete herself suffered from bone cancer in 2018, but was successfully treated. On the donation page of little Milosz, his mother had written that her child could not be treated in Poland and needed an operation at Stanford, USA.
As Andrejczyk announced on Instagram, the Polish supermarket chain Zabka Polska won the medal. In total, enough money (around 106,000 euros) was raised to make the operation possible. The supermarket chain decided that the javelin thrower could keep her medal. “We are touched by the beautiful and unusually noble gesture of our Olympic athlete,” wrote the group on Facebook. Maria Andrejczyk finished second behind Liu Shiying from China in Tokyo.