“It was a very sunny day,” he said in an interview with CTVNews. “There was one big, white cloud in the sky and the lightning bolt came through the trees and hit me.” Fortunately, McCathie survived and went on to win a life-changing prize on one of Canada’s biggest lottery games.
Luck seems to run in the family - McCathie’s daughter was also struck by lightning when she was trying to lock up boats during a storm in Manitoba and lived to tell the tale.
Sophie Leger, a professor of mathematics at the University of Moncton, calculated the odds of McCathie being struck by lightning, his daughter being struck by lightning and McCathie winning the lottery as being 1 in 2.6 trillion. The odds of winning Atlantic Lotto are 1 in 13,983,816, with the odds of being on the business end of a lightning bolt over the course of a year set at 1 in 700,000 according to National Geographic.
“I honestly expected to get hit by lightning again first,” McCathie remarked.
McCathie has been buying tickets for Lotto 6/49 for about a year with his coworker Diana Miller and plans to split the prize with her. He’ll also receive a retailer bonus of CA$10,000 for selling the winning ticket, as he owns the Amherst Shore County Store. Miller plans to take a holiday to Cancun, while McCathie would like to take his wife of 30 years on a second honeymoon.
