Regardless of the trips and adventures lottery winners may experience, the best stories are often related to how they won that huge sum of money. Some are funny, others are simply weird, and there are even inspirational stories for those who are not exactly hopeful about their odds. These 5 stories below about lucky Canadians are definitely among those.
Interesting Stories About Canadian Lottery Winners You Don`t Know
From almost losing the opportunity of losing one million Canadian dollars to donating the entire prize, this selection of stories could easily generate one movie for each tale. While Hollywood does not find out about them, entertain yourself with a brief description of how everything happened.
Almost Losing a C$1m Prize
The happy and lucky couple Nicole Pedneault and Roger Larocque bought a ticket for the Loto-Quebec game on Valentine’s Day, thinking about the future of their families. Similar to thousands of Canadians every year, they simply forgot about it.
Nearly a year afterward, close to the expiration date, Nicole came across the ticket, somehow lost between the pages of a book she bought in Japan, as stated by BBC. Thanks to her grandson, who needed that book and other souvenirs for a school presentation, they claimed the C$1m prize in time.
Patience is a Virtue
It is not rare for people to gamble numbers they dreamed of, but most of them give up after a few tries and aim at a different sequence. Olga Beno is the name of a woman who played six numbers she dreamed about in 1989 for 30 whole years.
According to CBC, she won $5.3 million after trusting all that time that her dream meant something. Ten years before the big prize, she fought cancer and even had to sell her home. Sometimes the timing is not as good as we want it to be.
Solidarity and Detachment
Tom Crist is the name of the Canadian who won a $40 million prize in Lotto Max and decided to donate it all, as per CTV News. Not even his daughter learned of the episode until she asked him. He started a foundation and is slowly picking support programs and charities to make donations instead of donating all at once.
Among his donations, the first one was to a Calgary cancer center in memory of the wife he lost to the disease.
The Best Mother’s Day Gift
Sophie Rizavas became a multimillionaire on Mother’s Day, thanks to a Lotto Max draw. At first, she thought she had won $50,000, but there were three more zeros in her receipt. Being a grandmother and a mother of two, she probably could not have had a better gift for her day. According to the Huffington Post, coincidentally, that was also the date when she immigrated from Greece, 44 years before her multimillionaire jackpot prize.
Powerball Canadian Winner
More Canadians are getting used to the possibility of playing international lotteries without leaving the country, but that is still a surprise to many people. Not for “P.,” a Canadian who won US$1 million in the U.S. Powerball, tells Cornwall Free News, after deciding their prize tiers were more interesting than the Canadians’. He simply woke up richer one day and had to pay a visit to New Jersey to collect the winnings.
The Takeaway
Some stories about lottery winners in Canada are almost as unlikely to happen as winning the jackpot twice, but they do. As paper tickets become less common, with people playing lottery games online, stories about finding the lucky sequence somehow might become rarer. Still, people will most certainly continue to surprise us with their lottery winning tales in some other way.
