He is a figure in international gymnastics and Olympics, all disciplines combined. Hungarian Agnès Keleti died this Thursday, January 2 at the age of 103. She had been hospitalized since last week in critical condition for pneumonia.
His Olympic quest began in 1952 at the Helsinki Olympic Games. Agnès Keleti, Hungarian gymnast, won her first Olympic title, on floor. She also won a silver and two bronze medals. Four years later, at the 1956 Melbourne Games, she was crowned four times. At the same time, she won two other silver medals. Ten Olympic medals in two Olympics, all won after 30 years.
An extra-ordinary life
Agnès Keleti was born on January 9, 1921, in Hungary. She won the national gymnastics championships at the age of 16, the starting point of her gymnastics career. She was considered to participate in the 1940 Olympic Games in Tokyo, but because she was Jewish, she was excluded from the team. The edition will ultimately be canceled. By taking the identity of a young Catholic, she will escape the Shoah, but this will not be the case for a large part of her family deported to Auschwitz, notably her father who will not survive. Hidden in the countryside, she worked as a maid but continued to train, in secret, on the banks of the Danube in her free time.
In 1948, she was injured while leaving for the London Olympic Games. The following year, she won four gold medals, one silver and one bronze at the 1949 World University Games. She would have to wait until the 1952 Games in Helsinki to become an Olympian and definitively engrave her name in marble by becoming Olympic champion. Two years later, at the 1954 world championships, she won two gold medals, a silver and a bronze.
Committed woman
In 1956, a few weeks before the opening of the Olympic Games in Melbourne, Soviet tanks invaded the Hungarian capital to counter the popular uprising against the country’s communist regime. Her mother lost her life during these events, while the gymnast was already on Australian soil. Despite the context and against the legendary Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina, Agnès Keleti won six new Olympic medals. At the age of 35, his incredible record allowed him to win the honorary title of athlete having won the most medals at the Melbourne Games, all disciplines combined.
The day after the closing ceremony, she refused to return to Hungary, and obtained, with 44 other athletes, political asylum in Australia.
After a few months in the Southern Hemisphere, she returned to Israel first to participate in a competition, her last, but above all to settle there and become a coach. It was under his leadership that Israel’s first gymnastics team was born. She waited until 1983 to return to Hungary, for the World Athletics Championships, but it was only in 2015 that she settled there definitively.
In 2019, 63 years after his Australian exile, his country of birth will finally award him the bonus offered by his Olympic medals, as well as an annual state bonus. It integrates the « Hall of Fame » of Gymnastics in 2002, won the Prize « First First » in Hungary in 2015 and the Prize “Israel Sport” in 2017.
A few days before celebrating her 104th birthday, she died at the age of 103 in a hospital in Budapest, leaving her mark forever on the world of sport and gymnastics.
Charlotte Laroche and Camille Rey
