After his 1992 Olympic gold medal was stolen, canoeist Joe Jacobi posted a plea on social media for help with finding it. Help came in the form of a 6-year-old girl, who found the award while on a walk with her family and mistook it for a Frisbee.
Reuters reported Jacobi, who is from Tennessee, was inside an Atlanta-area restaurant in early June with his family when a vehicle drove up, broke his car windows and made off with his medal. The medal was stolen from Jacobi's backpack along with a computer.
Jacobi started a social media campaign to find the medal, which was discovered by 6-year-old Chloe Smith while she was walking with her family on Saturday. Smith's father said she noticed the medal near the road and picked it up, mistaking it for a Frisbee. Her father, who remembered hearing about the stolen medal in previous stories by news outlets, contacted Jacobi.
Jacobi drove to Atlanta to give Smith a $500 reward to thank her for finding the medal. He also gave her dad some Olympic memorabilia.
"Everything that has happened over the last two weeks -- there has been so much goodness and kindness, and what happened today is just another extension of what we experienced over the last two weeks," he told the Chattanooga Times Free-Press.
Jacobi received the award for winning in the two-man canoe slalom event in 1992 in Barcelona, Spain.
Read more at Reuters and Chattanooga Times Free-Press.
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