World’s oldest Olympic champion and Holocaust survivor, Agnes Keleti has died, just a week to her 104th birthday anniversary.
She was born on January 9, 1921 in Budapest as Agnes Klein, she later changed her surname to the more Hungarian-sounding Keleti.
Keleti passed away on Thursday at Budapest hospital where she was admitted with pneumonia last week, her press official Tamas Roth said.
“We pray for her, she has a great vitality” her son, Rafael Biro-Keleti told the local press at the time, saying they would like to celebrate her 104th birthday on January 9th together as a family.
Keleti’s life story, including surviving the Holocaust and Olympic glory, reads like a gripping Hollywood film script, with her feisty spirit never breaking in the face of adversity.
As Hungary’s most successful gymnast, she won ten Olympic medals, all of them after reaching the age of 30 against much younger competitors, including five gold medals in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956).
Her motivation to do sports was not to chase glory, but to travel abroad, outside the Iron Curtain from the communist-ruled Hungary.
“I was competing not because I liked it, but I did it because I wanted to see the world,” she told AFP in 2016.
Called up to the national team in 1939, “the queen of gymnastics”, as she was addressed, won her first Hungarian title the next year, but later in 1940 was barred from taking part in any sporting activity due to her Jewish background.
Like many fellow Hungarian athletes, Keleti did not return home from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which were held weeks after Hungary’s failed anti-Soviet uprising.
The following year, she settled in Israel where she met and married a Hungarian sports teacher Robert Biro in 1959, with whom she had two children.
After retiring from competition, she worked as a physical education teacher and coached the Israeli national team.
She was only able to return home to then-communist Hungary for the World Gymnastics championships in 1983. She moved back to her home country in 2015.
“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,” she told AFP in 2020, weeks before her 100th birthday.
