How can I randomly select smaller values with higher probabilities?

I have a column vector "distances", and I want to select a value randomly from this vector such that smaller values have a higher probability of being selected. So far I am using the following, where "possible_cells" is the randomly selected value:

w=(fliplr(1:numel(distances)))/100
possible_cells=randsample((sort(distances)),1,true,w)

Basically, I flipped a second vector of the same size as "distances" to create probabilities of selection "w" (if I am understanding randsample correctly), so that the smallest value has the highest probability of being selected. To check how well this works, I randomly drew 50 values and by using a histogram, I see that the values are higher than I would expect. Does anyone have any idea on how else to do what I described above?