One of the great legends of gymnastics has died. Hungarian Olympic gymnastics champion and Holocaust survivor Agnes Keleti has died at the age of 103.
02.01.2025, 11:49
02.01.2025, 11:55
SDA
The sports portal "nemzetisport.hu" reported on the death, citing the family of the deceased. Keleti won one gold medal in gymnastics at the Olympic Games in Helsinki (1952) and four in Melbourne (1956). Until her death, she was the oldest living Olympic champion in the world.
Keleti was born Agnes Klein in Budapest to a Jewish family. Her aspiring career as a gymnast initially came to an end due to the discriminatory laws against Jews in Hungary, which was allied with Nazi Germany at the time. She survived the Hungarian Holocaust with false papers as a maid in the Hungarian province.
After 1945, she restarted her sporting career. As a four-time Olympic champion in Melbourne, she had already reached an unusual age for a top gymnast at 35. The Olympic Games took place immediately after the bloody suppression of the anti-communist Hungarian revolution in 1956 by Soviet troops.
Keleti decided not to return to her still communist homeland and stayed in Australia for the time being. She emigrated to Israel in 1957. After the democratic changes of 1989/90, she visited Hungary more and more frequently. In the last years of her life, she finally settled in Budapest.