BUDAPEST, Hungary — Agnes Keleti, a Holocaust survivor and the oldest living Olympic medal winner, has died. She was 103 years old.
Keleti died Thursday morning in Budapest, Hungary's state news agency said. She was hospitalized in critical condition with pneumonia on December 25th.
She won a total of 10 Olympic medals for Hungary, including five gold medals in gymnastics at the 1952 Helsinki and 1956 Melbourne Games.
She overcame the loss of her father and several relatives in the Holocaust to become one of the most successful Jewish Olympians.
“The last 100 years have felt like 60 years to me,” Keleti told The Associated Press on the eve of her 100th birthday. “I'm living well and I'm loving life. It's great that I'm still healthy.”
Born Agnes Klein in Budapest in 1921, her career was interrupted by World War II and the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 Olympics.
Keleti, who was kicked out of the gymnastics team in 1941 because of her Jewish ancestry, hid in the Hungarian countryside, where she disguised her identity and survived the Holocaust by working as a maid.
Her mother and sister survived the war with the help of the famous Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, but her father and other relatives died at Auschwitz, some of them in Nazi concentration camps and in collaboration with the Nazis in Hungary. This included more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews who were killed by the terrorists.
Keleti resumed her career after the war and was scheduled to compete in the 1948 London Olympics, but a last-minute ankle injury ended her hopes.
Four years later, at the age of 31, she made her Olympic debut at the 1952 Helsinki Games, winning a gold medal, one silver medal, and two bronze medals in the floor exercise.
In 1956, she became the most successful athlete at the Melbourne Olympics, winning four gold medals and two silver medals.
While she became the oldest gold medalist in gymnastics history at the age of 35 in Melbourne, an anti-Soviet uprising failed and the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. Keleti remained in Australia and sought political asylum. She immigrated to Israel the following year and worked as a trainer, coaching the Israeli Olympic gymnastics team until the 1990s.
