Agnes Keleti, World’s Oldest Olympic Champion, Dies At 103

Agnes Keleti, the world’s oldest Olympic champion and Holocaust survivor, has died at the age of 103.

According to her press representative Tamas Roth, who confirmed a report from the local sports journal Nemzeti Sport, she passed away on Thursday at a hospital in Budapest.

Last week, she was taken to the hospital with pneumonia.

“We pray for her, she has a great vitality” her son, Rafael Biro-Keleti told local press at the time, saying they would like to celebrate her 104th birthday on January 9th together as a family.

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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.

She told AFP in 2016 that she was competing because she wanted to see the world.

Training in secret

Born on 9 January 1921 in Budapest as Agnes Klein, she later changed her surname to the more Hungarian-sounding Keleti.

The “queen of gymnastics” was made a member of the national team in 1939, and the following year she won her first Hungarian title. However, in 1940, she was denied entry to any sporting activity because of her Jewish heritage.

She escaped deportation to a death camp after the Nazi Germans took Hungary in March 1944, assuming her identity as a young Christian woman, by obtaining false documents in exchange for all of her belongings.

While hiding in the countryside, she was working as a maid, but kept training in secret on the banks of the river Danube, when she got some free time.

Her mother and sister were saved thanks to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who also led the family’s deaths at Auschwitz.

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.

In 1959, she met and married Hungarian sports teacher Robert Biro, who had two children with her when she immigrated to Israel.

After she retired from competition, she worked as a physical education teacher, and coached the Israeli national team.

Only one of her only opportunities was to travel back to her former communist Hungary for the 1983 World Gymnastics Championships. In 2015, she returned to her native country.

In 2020, just weeks before her 100th birthday, she told AFP that she felt it was worthwhile to pursue a career that she loved, given the attention I received. “I get the shivers when I see all the articles written about me,” she said.

Source: Channels TV