She survived the Holocaust
At 103 years old: Oldest Olympic champion dies
02/01/2025 – 12:16 p.mReading time: 2 min.
The former Hungarian gymnastics legend survived the Holocaust and went on to win five Olympic gold medals. Now Ágnes Keleti died shortly before her 104th birthday.
She was the oldest living Olympic champion, now the Hungarian Ágnes Keleti has died at the age of 103. Her press spokesman Tamas Roth confirmed this to the AFP news agency. The former artistic gymnast, who died on Thursday in Budapest, was hospitalized last week with pneumonia. She would have celebrated her 104th birthday on January 9th.
Keleti was born Agnes Klein in Budapest in 1921 to a Jewish family. Her career as a gymnast initially ended because of the laws that discriminated against Jews in Hungary at the time, which was allied with Nazi Germany. She survived the Hungarian Holocaust with false papers as a maid in the Hungarian province.
“I looked similar to the girl who was called Piroschka. But I also had to speak the way she spoke, and that was difficult,” she later recalled. Many of her relatives, including her father, were murdered in Auschwitz.
After the war, Keleti resumed her sporting career. Despite her advanced age for a top athlete, she made history at the Olympic Games. She won her first gold medal in Helsinki in 1952, followed by four more in Melbourne in 1956. In total she won ten Olympic medals.
She was supposed to take part in the games in 1940, but they didn’t take place because of the Second World War, and Keleti was excluded from her gymnastics club because of her Jewish faith.
At the age of 35, she triumphed in Melbourne as one of the oldest gymnasts ever. The 1956 Games took place at a politically charged time in their homeland – immediately after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet troops.
Keleti decided not to return to communist Hungary, initially staying in Australia and emigrating to Israel in 1957. There she dedicated herself to the development of artistic gymnastics as a coach and became a pioneer in her adopted homeland.
After the political change in 1989/90, Keleti visited Hungary more and more often and finally settled in Budapest. Despite the traumas of her past, she looked back on her long life with optimism.