Posted 1 years ago
Athletics
General
Olympian sold her silver medal to raise funds for infant surgery.
It's a selfless act of an Olympic medallist, Maria Andrejczyk who sacrificed her silver medal for £90,000 to fund life-saving heart surgery for an eight-month-old boy.
The Polish Olympian, Maria Andrejczyk won silver at Tokyo 2020 in the javelin, sandwiched between winner Liu Shiying of China and Kelsey-Lee Barber, who took the bronze medal back to Australia.
Five days after her second-place finish, Maria Andrejczyk announced in the media that she decided to sell her medal to raise funds for 8-month-old Miloszek Malysa, who has to travel to California to undergo the surgery at Stanford University Medical Center.
The self-sacrificing athlete, a cancer survivor who didn't know the infant, wrote that she acted after reading his parents' pleas online, which forced her to feel the pain of the baby's parents. After a sympathetic conversation with the parents, Maria decides to help them any way she can.
Miłoszek has a serious heart defect, he needs an operation. He also has support from above from KubusAndrejczyk wrote that Miloszek needed 1.5 million zlotys — about $385,000 — to cover the costs of his transportation to the US and treatment.
She wrote that half the amount had already been raised by a family fundraiser and that her goal along with Małysa's mom was to raise the other half through the Olympic auction.
The bidding was won by Polish supermarket chain Zabka, which stumped up around £90,000 for the prize.
But the Olympian was not to be deprived of her medal for long, as the supermarket returned the medal to her so Miloszek's family could get the much-needed cash and Andrejczyk could keep the reward for her success in Tokyo.
She said the money raised will help the family to secure cardiac catheterization and partial abnormal vein repair surgery for their little boy at the Stanford University Medical Centre, near San Francisco.
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