Agnès Keleti 103 years old, the gymnast with 10 Olympic medals

Agnes Keleti, Holocaust survivor who won 10 Olympic gymnastics medals, dies at 103

Keleti moved to Israel in 1957 and helped build the new country’s gymnastics program.

BY PHILISSA CRAMER

As a teenager, Agnes Keleti’s sporting activities were interrupted by the Nazis, who murdered her father and more than 500,000 other Hungarian Jews.

A centenarian, she became a global sensation not only for surviving the Holocaust but also for returning to sport, resuming her gymnastics career to become one of Hungary’s most decorated athletes.

Keleti died Thursday at the age of 103 in Budapest, where she had returned after decades in Israel – where she is credited with creating the country’s gymnastics program – to live near her son. She was a week away from her 104th birthday.

“I was strong and I worked hard”Keleti told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2019, when she was 98 years old. “No one asked any questions. »

Here she was referring to her survival of the Holocaust by working as a domestic servant under false papers. (Her mother and sister were saved by Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews before being kidnapped by the Russians.) But she could have summed up her sporting career, which remains unparalleled in an era ultra-young gymnastics champions.

Agnes Keleti survived the Holocaust and became a renowned Hungarian Olympic athlete. She moved to Israel in the 1950s and helped create the new country’s gymnastics program.

After World War II, Keleti resumed training as a gymnast in 1946. She was prevented from competing at the 1948 London Olympics because she broke her collarbone in training.

But four years later, she won her first Olympic gold medal, in floor exercise, at the 1952 Helsinki Games. Keleti was 31 years old and competed against athletes ten years younger. She also won a silver medal and two bronze medals in other events, notably on the uneven bars.

It could have been the pinnacle of any professional athlete’s career. But for Keleti, it was just a warm-up before her spectacular performance at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. At 35, competing against gymnasts half her age, she won four gold medals and two silver.

His total of 10 medals remains tied with the record in Hungarian history. Fewer than 30 athletes, all countries combined, have already won more medals. Thanks to Hungarian policy, which provides a monthly allowance to Olympic athletes based on the number of medals they won, Keleti lived comfortably into old age.

But for most of her life, she didn’t live in the country she represented. She moved to Israel in 1957, remembering, despite her dementia at age 98, that she had wanted to leave communist Hungary because of the anti-Semitism there.

“It was not a good atmosphere to be Jewish, even for a star athlete,” she said at the time.

She ended up traveling to Israel at the behest of a former teacher from Budapest, who persuaded her to compete in the 1957 Maccabi Games after she sought asylum in Australia while stranded there because of political violence in Hungary. The country was so poor and Keleti’s sport so undeveloped that she had to bring her own bar and rings – but she quickly became a national hero who coached generations of gymnasts.

In 1972, Keleti joined the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, but he was away from the country when Palestinian terrorists attacked and killed 11 members of the delegation.

Keleti’s fame resurfaced in the age of social media, when videos of her performing as a young adult and stretching on an Israeli beach circulated annually around her birthday as a symbol of Jewish perseverance despite the Holocaust. A video produced by Kveller, JTA’s sister site, has been viewed 33 million times on Facebook alone.

In Israel, Keleti also married and had two sons.

In Israel, Keleti also married and had two sons.

“I grew up knowing my mother was Wonder Woman,” his son Raphael told JTA in 2019. “She ran the house, she taught us music, helped us with our homework, prepared meals so tasty that all the neighbors’ children wanted to stay for dinner. Oh, and in her free time, she was an international and local celebrity who traveled to coach athletes in the Olympics. Nothing too serious. »

JForum.fr with JTA

Agnes Keleti performs a split in front of young Hungarian gymnasts in Budapest, January 16, 2016. (Peter Kohalmi/AFP/Getty Images)