Javelin thrower Maria Andrejczyk has auctioned off her Tokyo Games silver medal for $125,000 to help an infant in her native Poland get life-saving heart surgery.
On Wednesday, Andrejczyk posted on her Facebook page that she came across the fundraiser for 8-month-old Miłoszek Małysa, who had a serious heart defect and needed surgery, and she decided to auction off her lone Olympic medal to help raise money for his surgery.
“He already has a head start from Kubus — a boy who didn’t make it in time but whose amazing parents decided to pass on the funds they collected,” she wrote in Polish on her page.
“And in this way, I also want to help. It’s for him that I am auctioning my Olympic silver medal.”
On Monday, she confirmed on Instagram that Żabka, a Polish supermarket chain, won the auction with a bid of $125,000. The money raised will allow the boy to get the necessary surgery at Stanford University Medical Center.
In a surprising twist of events, Żabka decided to give the medal back to Andrejczyk.
Andrejczyk, who missed an Olympic medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics by 2 centimeters, suffered from a shoulder injury in 2017 and was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2018. She went through recovery to make a comeback and win her first Olympic medal in Tokyo earlier this month.