Agnes Keleti, the world’s oldest Olympic champion and a Holocaust survivor, has passed away at the age of 103.
She died on Thursday at a hospital in Budapest, confirmed her press representative, Tamas Roth, to AFP, following a report from local sports newspaper Nemzeti Sport. Keleti had been hospitalized with pneumonia the previous week.
“We pray for her, she had great vitality,” her son, Rafael Biro-Keleti, told the local press at the time, adding that the family had hoped to celebrate her 104th birthday together on January 9th.
Keleti’s extraordinary life, marked by surviving the Holocaust and achieving Olympic glory, reads like a dramatic Hollywood story, with her resilient spirit remaining unbroken despite numerous challenges.
As Hungary’s most successful gymnast, Keleti won ten Olympic medals, including five golds in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956), all achieved after turning 30 and competing against much younger athletes. Her passion for sports was not driven by a desire for fame, but rather a wish to travel beyond the Iron Curtain in communist Hungary. “I wasn’t competing because I liked it; I did it because I wanted to see the world,” she told AFP in 2016.
Born Agnes Klein in Budapest on January 9, 1921, she later adopted the more Hungarian-sounding surname Keleti. She was called up to the national team in 1939 and won her first Hungarian title the following year. However, in 1940, her Jewish background led to her being banned from participating in any sporting activities.
During the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944, Keleti avoided deportation to a death camp by obtaining false documents in exchange for all her belongings, assuming the identity of a young Christian woman. While hiding in the countryside, she worked as a maid but continued to train in secret on the banks of the Danube whenever she had free time. Tragically, her father and several family members were killed in Auschwitz, though her mother and sister survived with the help of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
In the wake of Hungary’s failed anti-Soviet uprising in 1956, Keleti, like many other Hungarian athletes, chose not to return home after the Melbourne Olympics. She settled in Israel in 1957, where she met and married Hungarian sports teacher Robert Biro in 1959, with whom she had two children.
After retiring from competition, Keleti worked as a physical education teacher and later coached the Israeli national gymnastics team. She was only able to return to communist Hungary for the World Gymnastics Championships in 1983. In 2015, she moved back to Hungary.
Reflecting on her life, Keleti told AFP in 2020, shortly before her 100th birthday, “It was worth doing something well in life, considering the attention I have received. I get the shivers when I see all the articles written about me.”
