She survived the Holocaust and became a successful Olympic athlete: Agnes Keleti has now died at the age of 103. The five-time gymnastics gold medalist remained loyal to her sport for a long time.
One of the great legends of gymnastics is dead. The Hungarian Olympic champion and Holocaust survivor Agnes Keleti has died at the age of 103. This was reported by the sports portal nemzetisport.hu, citing the family of the deceased. She was admitted to hospital in critical condition with pneumonia on Christmas Day.
Keleti won one gold medal in gymnastics at the Olympic Games in Helsinki (1952) and four gold medals in Melbourne (1956). She was the oldest living Olympic champion in the world.
“I live well. And I love life,” Keleti said in an interview three years ago. The picture shows the Olympic champion celebrating her 103rd birthday.
Escape through false identity
“These 100 years felt like 60 to me,” Keleti told the AP news agency shortly before her 100th birthday. “I live well. And I love life. It's great that I'm still healthy.”
Keleti was born Agnes Klein in Budapest in 1921 to a Jewish family. Her budding career as a gymnast ended when Hungary allied itself with the German Empire and also persecuted Jews during the Second World War.
Keleti was forced to leave her gymnastics club because of her Jewish origins. She hid in the Hungarian countryside and survived the mass murder of European Jews by assuming a false identity and working as a maid. Keleti's mother and sister also survived. Her father and other relatives were murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp.
She remained loyal to gymnastics even in her mid-90s: Keleti at a training session for young people in Budapest in 2016.
Return to Hungary after the fall of communism
After 1945 she started her sporting career again. As a four-time Olympic champion in Melbourne 1956, at 35 she had already reached an unusual age for a top gymnast. Shortly before its victories in Australia, the Soviet Union had bloodily crushed the Hungarian revolution in order to keep the communist regime there in power.
Keleti decided not to return home and stayed in Australia for the time being. In 1957 she emigrated to Israel. She worked there as a coach for the Israeli Olympic gymnastics team until the 1990s. After the democratic change in 1989/90, she visited Hungary more and more frequently. In the last years of her life she finally settled in Budapest.
