Agnes Keleti, the world's oldest Olympic champion and Holocaust survivor, has died at the age of 103 in early January in a Budapest hospital, just a few days before her 104th birthday on January 9th. Agnes was the oldest living Olympian and as Hungary’s most successful gymnast, she won 10 Olympic medals, all of them after reaching the age of 30, against much younger gymnasts. She won 5 medals in Helsinki (1952) and 5 in Melbourne (1956.) Born as Agnes Klein in 1921, she changed her last name to Keleti and was soon called the ‘queen of gymnastics’ in Hungary, but in 1940, she was barred from any sporting activity due to her Jewish background. She was sent to a concentration camp but in March 1944 she obtained false documents and was able to escape, assuming the identity of a Christian woman. Agnes worked as a maid and kept training on the banks of the river Danube. Her father and other family members were killed in Auschwitz, but her mother and sister were rescued thanks to a Swedish diplomat. Then after the Melbourne Olympics, she never returned home but settled in Israel where she met and married her Hungarian sports teacher Robert Biro, with whom she had 2 children. After retiring from competition, she worked as a physical education teacher and coached the Israeli national team. She only moved back to Hungary in 2015.
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