Olympian auctions off medal for child

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 Miłoszek Małysa, she wrote Aug. 11 on Facebook, 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 Zabka, 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.”

Zabka, however, gave the medal back to Andrejczyk.