The Oldest Olympic Gold Medalist Dies At Age 103

The world’s oldest living Olympic gold medalist and Holocaust survivor, Agnes Keleti, has died at the age of 103.

Keleti was a five-time Olympic champion Hungarian gymnast who won her first gold at the age of 31 at the 1952 Games in Helsinki, before winning four more in Melbourne in 1956 to become the oldest female gymnast to win gold.

She had 10 Olympic medals, of which five were gold medals; this made her the second most successful Hungarian athlete of all time.

Keleti was born on 9th January 1921 in Budapest as Agnes Klein; she later changed her surname to the more Hungarian-sounding Keleti and won her first Hungarian championship in 1940, but later that year she was banned from all sports activities because of her Jewish origin.

According to the Hungarian Olympic Committee (HOC), Keleti escaped deportation to Nazi death camps by hiding in a village south of Budapest with false papers. Her father and several relatives died in the Auschwitz death camp.

Keleti settled in Israel a year after the Melbourne Games, where she married and had two children while coaching gymnastics.

Keleti died on Thursday (today) at Budapest Military Hospital, where she was being treated for heart failure and breathing difficulties, says the HOC. She would have turned 104 on 9th January.