Agnes Keleti, the world’s oldest Olympic champion and Holocaust survivor, has died on the age of 103.
She handed away on Thursday at Budapest hospital, her press official Tamas Roth informed AFP, confirming a report from native sports activities each day Nemzeti Sport.
She was hospitalised with pneumonia final week.
“We pray for her, she has an incredible vitality” her son, Rafael Biro-Keleti informed native press on the time, saying they wish to rejoice her 104th birthday on January ninth collectively as a household.
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Keleti’s life story, together with surviving the Holocaust and Olympic glory, reads like a gripping Hollywood movie script, along with her feisty spirit by no means breaking within the face of adversity.
As Hungary’s most profitable gymnast, she gained ten Olympic medals, all of them after reaching the age of 30 in opposition to a lot youthful opponents, together with 5 gold medals in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956).
Her motivation to do sports activities was to not chase glory, however to journey overseas, exterior the Iron Curtain from the communist-ruled Hungary.
“I used to be competing not as a result of I favored it however I did it as a result of I needed to see the world,” she informed AFP in 2016.
Coaching in secret
Born on 9 January 1921 in Budapest as Agnes Klein, she later modified her surname to the extra Hungarian-sounding Keleti.
Referred to as as much as the nationwide group in 1939, “the queen of gymnastics” gained her first Hungarian title the subsequent 12 months, however later in 1940 was barred from participating in any sporting exercise attributable to her Jewish background.
After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, she escaped deportation to a dying camp by acquiring false paperwork in change for all her belongings, assuming the identification of a younger Christian lady.
Whereas hiding within the countryside, she was working as a maid, however stored coaching in secret on the banks of the river Danube, when she acquired some free time.
Her father and a number of other members of her household have been killed in Auschwitz, whereas her mom and sister have been rescued due to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
Like many fellow Hungarian athletes, Keleti didn’t return residence from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which have been held weeks after Hungary’s failed anti-Soviet rebellion.
The next 12 months she settled in Israel the place she met and married a Hungarian sports activities trainer Robert Biro in 1959, with whom she had two youngsters.
After she retired from competitors, she labored as a bodily schooling trainer, and coached the Israeli nationwide group.
She was solely in a position to return residence to then-communist Hungary for the World Gymnastics championships in 1983. She moved again to her residence nation in 2015.
“It was value doing one thing nicely in life, contemplating the eye I’ve acquired, I get the shivers after I see all of the articles written about me,” she informed AFP in 2020, weeks earlier than her one hundredth birthday.
AFP
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