Getting the Olympic medal should be, for an athlete, the most ambitious goal to achieve in the own career. However, the Polish discus thrower Piotr Malachowski has demonstrated with his exemplary behavior that sometimes reaching the top might be the opportunity for something even bigger.
Malachowski earned his second silver medal during the Rio 2016 Olympic Games (the first had been achieved during the 2008 Beijing edition) in the discus throw discipline, finishing just 82 cm adrift of Germany’s Christoph Harting, who took the gold.
But just after a few week after the celebration for the victory, Malachowski announced his totally unexpected will on his Facebook profile: the athlete would have donated his award to help a compatriot 3-years-old boy, who had been stricken by retinoblastoma, a form of eye cancer which usually affects young children. The decision came after Olek’s mother contacted the just triumphant Polish athlete, asking him if could help her son. The money raised from the auction of the precious medal would have gone toward a funding for the treatment of this particular disease, only available in New York.
As we wrote on his Facebook page “ The fate has given me a chance to increase the value of my silver.”: in fact, immediately he made an appeal to his fans to help spread the word about the auction by creating the hashtag #OcalicOkoOlka, which, translated from Polish, means “Save Olek’s Eye.”