Hungarian gymnast Agnes Keleti, a five-time Olympic champion, the world’s oldest living Olympic gold medalist and a survivor of the persecution of Jews in World War II, died Thursday at the age of 103, the Olympic Committee said. Hungarian.
Born Agnes Klein in Budapest on January 9, 1921, Keleti joined the National Gymnastics Association in 1938 and won her first Hungarian championship in 1940, although she was banned from all sporting activity that year due to her Jewish origin.
“Agnes Keleti is the best gymnast Hungary has ever produced, but her life and career became intertwined with her country’s politics and her religion,” the International Olympic Committee states in a profile published on its website.
The Hungarian Olympic Committee said Keleti fled deportation to Nazi death camps, where hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered, hiding in a village south of Budapest with false documentation. His father and several relatives died in the Auschwitz extermination camp.
She won her first gold medal at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, at age 31, an age by which most gymnasts had long since retired.
Keleti reached the peak of her career at Melbourne 1956, where she won four gold medals and became the oldest gymnast to win a gold. A year later, Keleti settled in Israel, where she married and had two children.
Her 10 Olympic medals, five of them gold, place Keleti as the second most decorated Hungarian athlete of all time, according to the Hungarian Olympic Committee. He has also received several Hungarian state awards.
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