Two-time Olympic silver medalist in taekwon-do Alexandros Nikolaidis has died at the age of 42. For the past two years, he has been battling an extremely rare form of cancer. Nikolaidis was also deputy spokesman for the main opposition party, SYRIZA.
The great athlete and father of two young children previously announced his impending death with a post on his social media pages. His heartbreaking message begins like this: “I’ll start with the cliché that if you’re reading this right now, I’ve probably gone somewhere better or nowhere.
I also suffered from cancer for two years. Such a rare type of cancer, walnut carcinoma, that currently nine out of ten Greek doctors who read this message hear about it for the first time and rush to see it. Among other things, he thanked his team of doctors for keeping him alive so that his youngest daughter, who was 3.5 years old when he was diagnosed, had time to remember him.
Doctor “moved heaven and earth to bring drugs from literally the other side of the earth so that I could try”he wrote.
“My friends, in this life where we are all fleeting, the most important thing is what trace we leave, and not how or when we leave.
For this reason, if I am the first registered patient with walnut carcinoma in our country, let me be an occasion to inform doctors and patients about this type of cancer, which, if diagnosed in time, can save a life. Let this be an occasion to significantly strengthen our national health system, which has been so underestimated in recent years, to avoid waiting in lines for CT scans, chemotherapy or surgery, and wasting valuable time to stop the drawn-out maze of bureaucracy and legal bottlenecks EOF [Национальной организации по лекарственным средствам]when potentially life-saving experimental drugs need to be approved immediately.”
He wrote about his last wish: to auction his silver medals for the children. “If we come into this life with a purpose, I have decided who it will be. To give hope through what I have achieved in my life, “from good to bad.”
“For this reason, my two Olympic silver medals, from Athens and Beijing, which I have been hiding well for many years, it’s time to get out and return to where they belong, to universal values. My last wish is that these two medals be displayed auction, and the collected amount was transferred to the structures for children chosen by my family.
“If even one child is saved, it will be worth every blow to the head, every broken leg. This is the imprint that I want to leave in society, this is the legacy that I want to leave for my children.”
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