Agnes Keleti, Holocaust survivor and one of the best Jewish athletes of all time, has died at the age of 103.
The Hungarian-Israeli five-time Olympic champion was the world’s oldest living Olympic gold medalist. She leaves behind a legacy of sporting excellence as Hungary’s most decorated female Olympian. At 95, she could still perform the splits.
While she lost her father in the Holocaust, she survived the persecution of Jews during World War Two by changing her name and working as a maid to a Nazi-sympathising family.
War halted her Olympic dreams by leading to the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 games, but Keleti went on to make gymnastics history by winning her first Olympic gold at 31 – at least double the age of today’s female gymnasts at their prime, before she helped to develop the sport in Israel.
Hungarian-Israeli retired Olympic and world champion artistic gymnast Agnes Keleti poses for photos in her apartment in Budapest on November 6, 2020 (Getty)
Born Agnes Klein in Budapest in 1921, Keleti was a keen cellist, dancer and swimmer growing up. She discovered gymnastics at 16 and trained at the well-known Jewish VAC Club of Budapest.
In 1938, she joined the National Gymnastics and won her first Hungarian championship in 1940. But she was soon banned from all sports activities that year because of her Jewish heritage and was expelled from her gymnastics team.
Keleti was forced to take a five-year hiatus from her sporting career as war raged on, and she changed her name from Klein to Keleti.
In 1944, when forces from Nazi Germany invaded Hungary, she married fellow Hungarian gymnast István Sárkány after hearing that newly-wed women would not be deported to a labour camp.
She bought fake identity papers and became Yuhasz Piroshka, a Christian. During the war, she survived through working jobs as a furrier, a housekeeper for a Nazi-sympathizing Hungarian family, and in an ammunition factory.
Her mother and sister survived the war years by acquiring papers issued by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat in Budapest who rescued thousands of Jews. He gave them “protective passports” (Schutz-Pass), which claimed the women were Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation.
Keleti’s father and other relatives were killed at Auschwitz, among the more than half a million Hungarian Jews murdered in Nazi death camps and by Hungarian Nazi collaborators.
About her father’s death, she told Haaretz newspaper: “I thought about how it was, what a horrible death…Before I left [home] I said, ‘Dad, do like me, don’t wait.’ He said, ‘I don’t have strength anymore for this, I’m too old for this.'”
After the war, she resumed her gymnastics career, but her Olympics dreams were once again dashed when an ankle injury meant she couldn’t compete in the 1948 London Games.
Four years later, she finally made her Olympic debut at the 1952 Helsinki Games, where she won a gold medal in the floor exercise as well as a silver and two bronzes at the age of 31.
At the World Gymnastics Championships in 1954, she won the uneven parallel bars, for her only individual world title, and was on the winning Hungarian team in the team portable apparatus event.
Credit: Hungarian Gymnastics Federation
In 1956, she became the most successful athlete at the Melbourne Olympics and the oldest female gymnast to win an Olympic title at 35 years old.
She won winning four golds in the uneven bars, balance beam, floor, and team event, and two silver medals.
During the event, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. Keleti was granted asylum and remained in Australia, before she immigrated to Israel where she married Hungarian physical education teacher Robert Biro, and they had two sons, Daniel and Rafael.
Her first marriage to Sarkany ended in divorce in 1950. Biro died before her.
About arriving in Israel, she told Haaretz: “I felt here that I was at home…”This is the only place in the world where I’m not a ‘jid’ – I’m an Israeli. And that was worth it to me.”
Keleti was responsible for first bringing professional gymnastics equipment to Israel, such the balance beam and uneven bars, and helped to develop the sport in the country.
She taught physical education at the Orde Wingate Institute for 34 years and became the national women’s gymnastics coach until the 1990s.
In 2002, she was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 2002 and was awarded the Israel Prize in 2017, the country’s most prestigious award, for her contribution to the sport.
Today, she remains the most successful female Jewish athlete in Olympic history.
Despite experiencing the hardship of political upheaval in her early career, she dedicated the later years of her life to nurturing the gymnastics athletes of tomorrow.
“The past? Let’s talk about the future,” she told the The Associated Press in January 2020 on the eve of her 99th birthday. “That’s what should be beautiful.”
