Agnes Keleti, world’s oldest Olympic Champion, dies at 103

Growing up in a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, Agnes Keleti was immersed in sports and the world of music. She took gymnastics lessons, swam and played the cello.

Then darkness descended.

Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, marking the start of World War II in Europe. The Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944 and deported hundreds of thousands of its Jews to death camps, among them Keleti’s father, Ferenc Klein, who died at Auschwitz.

Using papers she bought that identified her as a Christian girl, Keleti survived the war, working as a maid and a munitions worker. Her mother, Rosza, and her sister, Vera, also survived.

When the war ended, Keleti began rebuilding her life and turned once more to gymnastics.

Competing in her 30s against far younger athletes, she won a total of five gold, three silver and two bronze medals at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki and the 1956 Games in Melbourne, Australia. She settled in Israel in 1957, played a major role in building its gymnastics programs and received its highest honor for a civilian, the Israel Prize, in 2017.

Spry enough to do leg splits into her 90s, she expressed pride in influencing young people to take up gymnastics and to embrace physical fitness.

“The past? Let’s talk about the future,” she told The Associated Press on the eve of her 99th birthday in January 2020. “That’s what should be beautiful.”

Keleti was the oldest Olympic champion when she died early Thursday at age 103 in Budapest, having returned there in her final years.

Her death was announced by the Hungarian Olympic Committee on its website.

Agnes Keleti was born Jan. 9, 1921, in Budapest. She graduated from high school in 1939, but because of admissions quotas on Jews, she could not attend a university. In 1941, she was expelled from her athletic club in Budapest along with the other “non-Aryans.” Then came the years of shielding her Jewish identity.

At the war’s end, Keleti resumed her gymnastics pursuits, winning her first Hungarian championship in 1946. She was selected for Hungary’s gymnastics team at the 1948 London Olympics, after the two previous Games were canceled because of the war, but was sidelined by an injury shortly before the competition got underway.

Keleti won a gold medal in the floor exercise at the Helsinki Games, a silver in the team competition and two bronze medals for the uneven bars and the team portable apparatus event. She won four golds in Melbourne — for the balance beam, floor exercise, uneven bars and the team portable apparatus — and won silver for the individual all-around and the team competition.

She was training in Australia in the run-up to the 1956 Olympics when the Soviet Union crushed an anti-Communist rebellion in Hungary, and was among nearly 50 Hungarian athletes who pursued asylum in Australia after the Games. She immigrated to Israel in 1957.

There, Keleti trained gymnasts at the Wingate Institute for Physical Education and Sport in Netanya and coached the Israeli national women’s gymnastics team.

Recalling the Hungary of the Cold War years, she told The Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a 2018 interview that “there was a lot of antisemitism.”

“It wasn’t a good atmosphere to be Jewish,” she said, “even for a star athlete.”

At the time of her death, Keleti’s five gold medals in women’s gymnastics tied her with Polina Astakhova of the Soviet Union and Nadia Comaneci of Romania for third place on the Olympic list, behind Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union, who won nine golds, and Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia, with seven.

(Her total of 10 medals, as listed by the International Olympic Committee, does not include a silver she received as a member of Hungary’s 1948 Olympics squad, which finished second in the team competition, since she did not compete because of her injury.)

Keleti was inducted into the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2001 and the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 2002. She was named one of Hungary’s 12 “Athletes of the Nation” in 2004, having won her country’s all-around gymnastics championship 10 times in addition to her Olympic exploits.

Her Israel Prize citation said she was “one of the originators of artistic gymnastics in Israel and led the sport for over 50 years.”

“For me, sports was really just a way to see the world,” Keleti told the AP in 2012. “Maybe that’s why I never got nervous. People said they got scared before competitions. That never happened to me. Gymnastics was just a part of my life.”

Keleti’s survivors include her sons, Daniel and Rafael, from her marriage in 1959 to Robert Biro, a former Hungarian physical education teacher whom she met in Israel. He died before her. Her first marriage, to Istvan Sarkany, ended in divorce in 1950.

Keleti was in her early 40s when she twice became a mother.

“They didn’t believe I could win a gold medal when I was 35 and I won four,” she was quoted as saying in “Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports” (1998).

She added, “My children were just two more gold medals.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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