Perseverance is good for Catherine Wall, Carmen Austria and Gary Perkins.
These three Canadian friends won 50 million Canadian dollars (around 35 million euros) in the lottery in mid-December and have just received their winnings, the local newspaper Calgary Herald reported this Wednesday, February 7.
These three ex-colleagues have gotten into the habit of playing the lottery together on a regular basis for 17 years, with the hope of perhaps one day winning the jackpot.
And it was on December 11 that luck knocked on their door, they said during a press conference organized on Wednesday.
“Tell me I’m not wrong”
Carmen was the first of the trio to discover the news around 6 a.m.: her two friends were still sleeping when she inquired about the results of the day before's draw.
She was not aware that it was in her city, Calgary, that the jackpot had hit.
She then checked her ticket in the application for this purpose and saw her winnings appear.
She then took her husband out of the shower to show him the screen of her phone.
“Tell me I’m not mistaken,” she told him at that moment.
She couldn't help but frantically try to reach her friends to share the news.
But at 6 a.m., Catherine and Gary were still in the arms of Morpheus and did not have the same reaction to the news: “When we receive an SMS at 6:20 a.m., we say to ourselves: Oh
no , What is happening ?
Something serious
,” Catherine explained.
But Gary was much more interested in his night's sleep.
" I did not answer.
And then I ended up grabbing my phone and I saw these texts with this photo saying we had won 50 million.”
The three lucky multimillionaires will now receive 16.6 million Canadian dollars each, or 11.5 million euros.
“I am happy that the three of us can share this amount.
It’s a lot of money, I don’t know what I would have done with $50 million,” Carmen said.
Gary jokingly said: “Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to win 50 million, but emotionally, this story is much more rewarding”