Former Olympian Gymnast Keleti Dies at 103
Agnes Keleti took home 10 medals combined from the 1952 Helsinki Games and 1956 Melbourne Games.

For the Jewish athletic community, the new year was barely a day old when sad news came over the wire: Agnes Keleti, the renowned Hungarian and Israeli Olympic gymnast who won 10 medals between the 1952 Helsinki Games and the 1956 Melbourne Games, passed away at the age of 103 at a hospital in Budapest. The world’s oldest Olympic champion, Keleti was a week shy of turning 104 before succumbing to heart and breathing problems in the early hours of Thursday, Jan. 2.
Keleti’s Olympic glory and later stewardship of the Israeli gymnastics program, for which she received the Israel Prize in 2017, while remarkable, represent only one facet of her life story. Born in Budapest on Jan. 9, 1921, Keleti would excel in athletics and music before graduating from high school at the dawn of World War II in 1939. Two years after being barred from higher education due to admissions quotas for Jews, Keleti was banished from her hometown athletic club along with other “non-Aryans.”
Soon thereafter, Keleti faced a far graver situation as she had to find refuge in the Hungarian countryside to elude the Nazi regime that had descended on her homeland. Ultimately, Keleti survived the Holocaust by assuming a false identity and working as a maid in a remote village while her mother and sister likewise were spared the Nazis’ atrocities with the help of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews before being abducted by the Russians. Tragically, however, her father and several uncles weren’t so fortunate, as they perished at Auschwitz.
At the conclusion of the war, Keleti briefly worked as a cellist before resuming her quest to be a professional gymnast. After a last-minute injury dashed her hopes of competing for Hungary at the 1948 London Olympics, Keleti dazzled four years later at the Helsinki Games, taking home a gold medal in the floor exercise, a silver in the team competition and two bronze medals for the uneven bars and the team portable apparatus event. In the next Olympics in Melbourne, going up against gymnasts nearly half her age, including the legendary Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina, Keleti was even more dominant, snagging four golds (balance beam, floor exercise, uneven bars and the team portable apparatus) and silver for the individual all-around and the team competition. The half-dozen medal haul made her not only the most successful gymnast at the Melbourne Games, but also the most victorious participant of those Olympics – in any event.
Speaking to the Associated Press on the eve of her 99th birthday in January 2020 at her elegant apartment in downtown Budapest, Keleti said, “It’s not the medals that are significant but the experiences that came with them. I loved gymnastics because it was possible to travel for free.
“The past? Let’s talk about the future. That’s what should be beautiful. The past is past but there is still a future.”
Following her record-setting Olympic performance in Melbourne, Keleti would indeed have a very bright future. Amidst the Soviet Union’s ruthless clampdown on her homeland in 1956, Keleti, along with dozens of other Hungarian Olympians, stayed in Australia well after the Melbourne Games ended. A year later, she immigrated to Israel where she worked with gymnasts at the Wingate Institute for Physical Education and Sport in Netanya and coached the Israeli national women’s gymnastics team well into her later years. Accordingly, her aforementioned Israel Prize citation notes that Keleti was “one of the originators of artistic gymnastics in Israel and led the sport for over 50 years.”
Yet for all her breathtaking Olympic feats – not to mention being anointed the Hungarian National Champion in gymnastics 10 times and getting inducted into the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2001 and the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 2002 — Keleti never had much use for being showered with lavish praise or medals on the podium. She simply loved gymnastics, and the unique opportunities, namely global travel opportunities that weren’t readily available to many of her contemporaries, the sport afforded her.
“For me, sports was really just a way to see the world,” Keleti, told the AP in 2012, three years before she would return to her home country to settle in Budapest.
“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 is survived by her two sons, Daniel and Rafael, from her marriage in 1959 to Robert Biro, a former Hungarian physical education teacher whom she had met in Israel. He died before her. Her first marriage, to Istvan Sarkany, ended in divorce in 1950.
From a professional perspective, Keleti’s place in the pantheon of Jewish sports legends will be forever secure as her handful of gold medals leaves her tied with Polina Astakhova of the Soviet Union and Nadia Comaneci of Romania for fourth place on the Olympic list, behind Latynina, who earned nine golds, and Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia and Simone Biles of the United States, both with seven.
“She [Keleti] will be remembered forever for her inspirational story,” International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach commented earlier this month.
“Agnes Keleti has demonstrated the power of strong determination and courage to overcome tragedy when she, born to a Jewish family, survived the Holocaust and went on to win 10 Olympic medals after World War II, five of them gold. This is truly awe-inspiring.”
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