Agnes Keleti, the world’s oldest Olympic champion and a Holocaust survivor, has passed away just days before her 104th birthday. Keleti, born Agnes Klein on January 9, 1921, in Budapest, later changed her surname to the more Hungarian-sounding Keleti.
She died on Thursday at a hospital in Budapest, where she had been admitted the previous week due to pneumonia, as confirmed by her press representative, Tamas Roth.
Keleti’s son, Rafael Biro-Keleti, shared a message of resilience and hope, saying, “We pray for her, she has great vitality,” and expressed the family’s wish to celebrate her 104th birthday together. They had planned to mark the milestone on January 9.
Keleti’s extraordinary life, which included surviving the Holocaust and achieving Olympic glory, reads like a Hollywood script. Despite facing numerous challenges, her unwavering spirit remained intact. As Hungary’s most decorated gymnast, Keleti won ten Olympic medals, including five golds, during the 1952 Helsinki and 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Remarkably, she achieved all this after the age of 30, competing against much younger athletes.
Her initial motivation for taking up sports was not to pursue fame but rather to travel beyond Hungary, which was under communist rule. She once explained, “I was competing not because I liked it, but I did it because I wanted to see the world,” in an interview with AFP in 2016.
Keleti’s gymnastic journey began in 1939 when she was called up to Hungary’s national team, and she won her first Hungarian title the following year. However, in 1940, she was barred from participating in any sporting activities due to her Jewish heritage. During the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, shortly after Hungary’s failed anti-Soviet uprising, she chose not to return to her home country. Instead, she settled in Israel the following year, where she met and married Hungarian sports teacher Robert Biro in 1959, and together they had two children.
After retiring from competitive gymnastics, Keleti worked as a physical education teacher and later coached the Israeli national gymnastics team. She was only able to return to her native Hungary for the 1983 World Gymnastics Championships, and she eventually moved back to Hungary in 2015.
Reflecting on her life in 2020, just before turning 100, Keleti remarked, “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.”
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