Silver medallist with a heart of gold: Polish Olympian Andrejczyk auctions off Tokyo Games medal to help infant get surgery
The cancer survivor helps raise $125,000 for the 8-month-old boy's operation
Washington: For Maria Andrejczyk, something mattered more than the silver medal she won in the javelin during the Tokyo Olympics. So the bone cancer survivor decided to auction her medal to raise money to help pay for surgery for an 8-month-old baby with a heart defect.
Andrejczyk came across a fundraiser for Mioszek Maysa, she wrote Aug. 11 on Facebook (translation from Polish via ESPN), and chose to sell her only Olympic medal to help a stranger.
Malysa “already has a head start,” Andrejczyk wrote, from a fundraiser for “a boy who didn’t make it in time but whose amazing parents decided to pass on the funds they collected and in this way, I also want to help. It’s for him that I am auctioning my Olympic silver medal.”
On Monday, she wrote that a $125,000 bid from abka, a Polish convenience store chain, was the winner, with funds helping the child have surgery at Stanford University Medical Center. She wrote that she was giving the chain her medal, “which for me is a symbol of struggle, faith and pursuit of dreams despite many odds.”
abka, however, gave the medal back to Andrejczyk, who had missed winning a medal in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics by a mere two centimeters.
Bone cancer
After Rio, her road to Tokyo was difficult as she dealt with shoulder and Achilles’ injuries and, far more troubling, learned that persistent headaches and nasal problems were osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer.
“It was not something very dangerous and I knew I could make a quick recovery,” she told worldathletics.org in 2020.
Three weeks after surgery, she was training again and this time she did not leave the Olympics in disappointment, winning the silver medal with a throw of 64.61 meters. China’s Liu Shiying took gold with a 66.34.
“I just want to be healthy first,” she said. “If I stay healthy I can then show what I’m capable of. I still love that feeling of improving through training. Javelin has made me a better person. It brings me joy.”
