For many aspiring athletes their focus is to make it to the Olympic Games. For the few for whom that dream becomes a reality, the goal then becomes to win a medal.
For the oldest surviving Olympic medallist her dream had to be put on hold for far longer than she would have wanted or expected. Which makes her success all the more remarkable. However it is is her journey to success that is equally astonishing, for while many would have abandoned their dreams she kept her’s alive.
Agnes Keleti was born on 9th January 1921 in Budapest Hungary. At the age of four like many young children she took up gymnastics and showed a real flair for it. By the age of 16 she was the Hungarian national Champion.
She was a very real challenger to come home from the 1940 Tokyo Olympic Games with a medal, and many believed she had the talent to win gold. However the outbreak of World War II saw the 1940 Olympic Games cancelled. Then as the conflict dragged on so too were the 1944 Olympic Games.
As if that was not enough to deal with and the world at war, in 1941 Agnes was thrown out of her gymnastics club in Budapest. The reason was that she was Jewish. Initially she went into hiding with her family. She then heard a rumour that if a Jew was married to a Gentile they were not sent to the labour camps, she married fellow Hungarian gymnast Istvan Sarkany in 1944. Despite the rumour many intermarried Jews were still sent to the concentration camps where they perished.
During the war she purchased forged papers from a non-Jewish girl and took on an assumed name, Yuhasz Piroshka, and worked in a munitions factory. She even worked as a maid in a small village, so the story goes her employer was a Nazi sponsored Hungarian Deputy commander.
Her mother and sister remained in hiding and were saved by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Unfortunately her father and other relatives were not so fortunate. They were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
During the destruction of the siege of Budapest in 1944/45 Agnes would rise early in the morning and help collect the bodies of her dead fellow Hungarians and place them in a mass grave. As she said in an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “is it possible to forget such a thing?”
When the war ended in 1945 Agnes was now 24 years old, and she immediately went back to training and won the Hungarian National Championship. In 1947 she won the Central European Gymnastics title. Away from competition she worked as a furrier and played the cello professionally; fulfilling a childhood dream.
She qualified for the 1948 London Olympics, but after tearing a ligament in her ankle was unable to compete. She is listed on the Official List of Gymnastic Participants as Ágnes Sárkány, her married name. She watched from the sidelines as her fellow gymnasts took home silver in the team event. In 1950 she divorced her husband.
Many athletes would not have overcome such disappointment. Many gymnasts would have known that time was slipping away in terms of their competitive careers. Yet Agnes was one determined individual. Finally 1952 at the age of 31 she made her Olympic debut.
Despite her age she was not there simply to make up the numbers. She had waited so long for this moment she was going to make sure that she savoured every moment and did not leave with any regrets. She won four medals. She won gold in the floor exercise, silver in the team competition, and bronze in the team portable apparatus event and the uneven bars.
For some that may have been enough but not Agnes Keleti. She continued to compete at the 1954 World Championships, where she won on the uneven bars, and became the world champion.
The 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne came around and she was still competing. Here she would win another six Olympic medals. four of them gold, making her the oldest ever female Olympic Gymnastics Gold medallist. She won gold medals in three of the four individual event finals: floor, bars, and balance beam, and placed second in the all-around. She was the most successful athlete at the Games.
This achievement was all the more remarkable when one considers that the Soviet Forces had moved into Hungary a month before the Olympic Games started. The Hungarian Olympic team had a difficult time of even making it to Melbourne. Along with 44 other athletes from the Hungarian delegation, Agnes decided to remain in Australia and received political asylum. Not surprisingly she became a coach for Australian gymnasts, she also worked in a factory in Sydney. “I’d had enough of Communism,” she is reported to have said.
In 1957 Agnes Keleti emigrated to Israel after competing in the 1957 Maccabiah Games. She then sent for her mother and sister to join her.
In 1959, she married Hungarian physical education teacher Robert Biro whom she had met in Israel, and they had two sons, Daniel and Rafael. After retiring from competition, she worked as a physical education instructor at Tel Aviv University, and for a further 34 years at the Wingate Institute for Sports in Netanya. In addition she found time to coach and work with Israel’s national gymnastics team well into the 1990s.
Agnes Keleti was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1981, the Hungarian Sports Hall of Fame in 1991, the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2001, and the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 2002. She was also named one of Hungary’s 12 “Athlete’s of the Nation” in 2004. She even has an asteroid named in her honour.
When Lydia Wideman passed away on the 13 April 2019 Agnes Keleti became the oldest surviving Olympic Champion. Earlier this year she celebrated her 100th birthday back in Budapest where her life started; she had returned in 2015.
Her final Olympic medal haul was five gold medals, three silver and two bronze. She is the most decorated Jewish female Olympian of all time. She has the third most medals won by a female Olympic Gymnast, and one wonders what might have been had she not been robbed of two Olympic Games due to the war and one through injury.
Not surprisingly for one who has lived through so much adversity in her early life she is quoted as saying in an interview, “Staying alive is more important than the medals.” Something else that this remarkable woman has managed to achieve.
