Ágnes Keleti belongs to an exclusive group of five female gymnasts who have collected four gold medals in the same Olympic Games. At the Melbourne 1956 Summer Games, she took three individual gold medals (beam, vault, floor exercise) and one with Hungary in the team competition.
The others on the list are Simone Biles, Larisa Latynina, Vera Cáslavská, and Ecaterina Szabó.
Help from Raoul Wallenberg
Keleti died on Thursday morning in Hungary's capital Budapest, where she had been treated for pneumonia since Christmas Day, according to AP.
She was born in Budapest in 1921 and took a total of 10 Olympic medals, including 5 gold. Particularly impressive considering that two Olympic Summer Games, 1940 and 1944, were cancelled due to World War II.
Keleti's Jewish roots meant that she was forced to leave her gymnastics team in 1941. She fled to the Hungarian countryside, where she hid and, with the help of, among other things, false identity documents, managed to survive the Holocaust.
Thanks to the help of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Keleti's mother and sister also survived. Her father and other relatives were, at the same time, taken to Auschwitz, where they, along with more than half a million other Hungarian Jews, fell victim to the Nazi extermination camp.
After the war, Ágnes Keleti resumed her career but was forced to decline the Olympic Games in London 1948 due to injury. The first Olympic gold medal came instead in Helsinki 1952 (floor exercise) before it was time for the career highlight four years later.
At the age of 35, she became the oldest Olympic gold medalist in gymnastics history in Melbourne 1956.
Sought political asylum
In connection with the Games, a popular uprising was crushed in her home country, when the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution.
Ágnes Keleti therefore stayed in Australia and sought political asylum. The following year, she moved to Israel, where she eventually began working as a coach. She coached, among other things, Israel's Olympic team until the early 1990s.
In January 2021, she was interviewed by AP on the occasion of her 100th birthday:
These 100 years have felt like 60 to me. I live well. And I love life. It's fantastic that I still have my health.
