The oldest living Olympic medal winner died Thursday at age 103, one week before her 104th birthday.
Ágnes Keleti competed for Hungary at the 1952 Helsinki Games and the 1956 Melbourne Games and brought home 10 medals in gymnastics, including five gold.
“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,” The New York Times reported.
After the 1956 Olympics, Keleti and many other Hungarian Olympians remained in Australia due to concerns about war at home.
In 1957, she moved to Israel and helped develop the sports of gymnastics there.
Keleti received Israel’s “highest honor for a civilian, the Israel Prize, in 2017,” in recognition of her work with the Israeli national women’s gymnastics team, per The New York Times.
Keleti was famous not just for her athletic achievements, but also for her Jewish faith.
She lived through the Holocaust to become one of the most successful Jewish Olympians in history.
“Forced off her gymnastics team in 1941 because of her Jewish ancestry, Keleti went into hiding in the Hungarian countryside, where she survived the Holocaust by assuming a false identity and working as a maid,” according to The Associated Press.
Her father and several other relatives died at Auschwitz during World War II, the AP reported.
In a 2018 interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Keleti explained that she faced antisemitism in Hungary even after she found Olympic success.
“It wasn’t a good atmosphere to be Jewish,” she said, “even for a star athlete.”
Keleti could still do the splits into her nineties, and was delighted by turning 100 back in 2021.
“These 100 years felt to me like 60,” Keleti told The Associated Press on the eve of her 100th birthday. “I live well. And I love life. It’s great that I’m still healthy.”
After spending most of her adult years in Israel and raising two sons there, Keleti returned to Hungary in her mid-nineties. She was in Budapest when she died Thursday.