Agnès Keleti will have had a life worthy of a film script. She was born on January 9, 1921 in Budapest under the name Agnes Klein, then took a Hungarian-sounding name. Called up to the national team in 1939, the queen of floor exercises was quickly excluded because of her Jewish origins. After the occupation of Hungary by the Third Reich in March 1944, she escaped deportation by obtaining false papers and assuming the identity of a young Christian, in exchange for all her property.
A refugee in the countryside, she works as a servant while secretly training on the banks of the Danube in her free time. His father and several members of his family were deported and exterminated in Auschwitz, while his mother and sister were saved thanks to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
Exile in Israel
After the war, she returned to competition, but had a false start in London in 1948: an injury hampered her efforts and the Olympic Games eluded her again. He would have to wait a few more years to win ten Olympic medals, including five gold at the Olympic Games in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956), all after the age of 30.
Like many Hungarian athletes, Agnès Keleti did not return home after the Australian events, which took place a few weeks after the failure of the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. “I did sport not because it made me feel good but to see the world,” she said in 2016.
She then moved to Israel where, in 1959, she married a Hungarian sports teacher, Robert Biro, with whom she had two children. After retiring from sports, Agnes Keleti worked as a physical education teacher and coached the Israeli national team. It was only in 1983, during the World Gymnastics Championships, that she returned for the first time to Hungary, then still communist. She will definitely return in 2015.
On the occasion of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, France wished to “pay tribute to his eminent merits” and awarded him the gold medal for youth, sports and community involvement in September. “Thank you for everything!” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban wrote on Facebook, paying tribute to the champion.
According to the country’s main sports daily, Nemzeti Sport, it is the Frenchman Charles Coste, gold medalist in the team pursuit in track cycling at the London Games in 1948, who succeeds Agnès Keleti as the longest-serving Olympic champion. old. Centenarian, born February 8, 1924, he carried the flame during the opening ceremony of the Paris Games.
