Agnès Keleti, famous Hungarian gymnast and oldest Olympic world champion, died this Thursday, January 2 at the age of 103, said her press secretary.
He was a sporting legend. Hungarian gymnast Agnes Keleti, the oldest Olympic champion in the world, died this Thursday in a hospital in Budapest. She was hospitalized last week with pneumonia, days before her 104th birthday.
A five-time Olympic gold medalist with an exceptional career, this tireless sportswoman born on January 9, 1921 had an extraordinary life. She won a total of ten Olympic medals, including five golds at the Olympic Games in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956), all after the age of 30. “I did sport not because it made me feel good but to see the world,” she told AFP in 2016.
she escaped deportation
Born in Budapest under the name Agnes Klein, before taking a Hungarian-sounding surname, she was called up to the national team in 1939, before being banned from all sporting activity due to 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.
While hiding in the countryside, she worked as a servant but secretly trained on the banks of the Danube when she had 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.
Like many Hungarian athletes, Agnes Keleti did not return home after the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which took place a few weeks after the failure of the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary, and settled in Israel. She only returned to Hungary permanently in 2015.
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