The world’s oldest living Olympic gold medallist, the Hungarian gymnast Agnes Keleti, who escaped the Holocaust with false identity papers and the Soviet Union’s brutal clampdown on her home country by emigrating to Israel, has died aged 103.
Keleti, who did not compete in an Olympics until she was 31 but won more medals than anyone else at the Melbourne Games, died on Thursday in Budapest, where she had returned to live in 2015, the Hungarian Olympic Committee (HOC) said.
“Agnes Keleti is the greatest gymnast produced by Hungary, but one whose life and career were intertwined with the politics of her country and her religion,” the International Olympic Committee said.
Besides being the oldest female gymnast to win Olympic gold, Keleti’s 10 medals, including five golds, rank her as the second most successful Hungarian athlete of all time. She was also one of the three most successful Jewish Olympians.
Born into a Jewish family as Agnes Klein on 9 January 1921, Keleti took up music and gymnastics as a child, becoming an accomplished – and later a professional – cello player and winning her first national gymnastics championship aged 16.
She was considered a medal hope for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics but the games were cancelled because of the second world war and, with Hungary under Nazi occupation, Keleti was expelled from her Budapest club with all other “non-Aryans” in 1941.
Forced to go into hiding, she survived the war in a village in the Hungarian countryside. Her mother, Rosza, and sister, Vera, also survived, but her father, Ferenc Klein, and several other relatives died in Auschwitz.
“I managed to buy the identification papers of a Christian girl, she was around the same age as me,” she said in a 2020 interview. “With my false papers I managed to escape to the country. I stayed in a remote village and found work as a maid.”
With the 1944 Olympics also cancelled, Keleti, who returned to gymnastics while working as a professional cellist after the war, qualified for the 1948 London Games but was unable to compete because of a torn ankle ligament. That meant her first Olympics was in Helsinki in 1952, by which time she was well past the retirement age of most gymnasts. Keleti won gold in the floor exercise, a silver in the team competition and two bronzes.
At the Melbourne Games in 1956 – competing against the legendary Larisa Latynina of the USSR, who went on to become the most decorated female gymnast in Olympic history – Keleti won four golds and two silvers.
Her victories, for the beam, floor exercise, uneven bars and the team portable apparatus, and second places in the individual all-around and team competitions, made her, aged 35, the Melbourne Games’s most successful competitor.
Astonishingly, her performance came after conflict had once more irrupted into her life. In November 1956, as she was training in Australia, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary. Along with 44 other Hungarian athletes, Keleti did not go home.
After briefly coaching Australian gymnasts, she emigrated to Israel in 1957 where she eventually settled, building a national gymnastics programme, coaching the Israeli team and winning the country’s highest civilian honour, the Israel Prize, in 2017. She was still doing the splits in her 90s.
Keleti died in hospital after reportedly being admitted with pneumonia on Christmas Day. She is survived by two sons, Daniel and Rafael, from her marriage to Robert Biro, a Hungarian sports instructor whom she met in Israel.
“I live well, and I love life,” she said, explaining her longevity shortly before her 100th birthday three years ago, adding: “It was worth doing something well in life. I get the shivers when I see all the articles written about me.”
