World’s oldest Olympic champion Agnes Keleti dies at 103

BUDAPEST: Agnes Keleti, the world’s oldest Olympic champion and Holocaust survivor, has died at the age of 103.

She passed away today at the Budapest hospital, her press official Tamas Roth told AFP, confirming a report from local sports daily Nemzeti Sport.

She was hospitalised with pneumonia last week.

“We pray for her, she has a great vitality” her son, Rafael Biro-Keleti told local press at the time, saying they would like to celebrate her 104th birthday on Jan 9 together as a family.

Keleti’s life story, including surviving the Holocaust and Olympic glory, reads like a gripping Hollywood film script, with her feisty spirit never breaking in the face of adversity.

As Hungary’s most successful gymnast, she won ten Olympic medals, all of them after reaching the age of 30 against much younger competitors, including five gold medals in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956).

Her motivation to do sports was not to chase glory, but to travel abroad, outside the Iron Curtain from the communist-ruled Hungary.

“I was competing not because I liked it but I did it because I wanted to see the world,” she told AFP in 2016.

Born on Jan 9, 1921 in Budapest as Agnes Klein, she later changed her surname to the more Hungarian-sounding Keleti.

Called up to the national team in 1939, “the queen of gymnastics” won her first Hungarian title the next year, but later in 1940 was barred from taking part in any sporting activity due to her Jewish background.

After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, she escaped deportation to a death camp by obtaining false documents in exchange for all her belongings, assuming the identity of a young Christian woman.

While hiding in the countryside, she was working as a maid, but kept training in secret on the banks of the river Danube, when she got some free time.

Her father and several members of her family were killed in Auschwitz, while her mother and sister were rescued thanks to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

Like many fellow Hungarian athletes, Keleti did not return home from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which were held weeks after Hungary’s failed anti-Soviet uprising.

The following year she settled in Israel where she met and married Hungarian sports teacher Robert Biro in 1959, with whom she had two children.

After she retired from competition, she worked as a physical education teacher, and coached the Israeli national team.

She was only able to return home to then-communist Hungary for the World Gymnastics championships in 1983.

She moved back to her home country in 2015.

“It was worth doing something well in life, considering the attention I have received, I get the shivers when I see all the articles written about me,” she told AFP in 2020, weeks before her 100th birthday.