Hungarian gymnast Agnes Keleti, the oldest Olympic champion, will celebrate her 100th birthday in a few days. For her anniversary, the book “The Queen of Gymnastics, Agnes Keleti is 100” was published.
The five-time Olympic champion and Holocaust survivor is one of the most titled Israeli athletes in the world. Keleti’s father and several members of her family were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and her mother and brother were saved thanks to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
“It is the past? Let’s talk about the future. This is what should be beautiful. The past is in the past, but there is the future”, Keleti said in one of her interviews.
She won 10 medals at major gymnastics championships, including five gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and five at the 1956 Melbourne Games. She won most of them when she was over 30 years of age, when Agnes competed with gymnasts half her age.
“It is not the medals that are important, but the experience gained with them”, Keleti says.
In 1957, Keleti emigrated from Hungary to Australia, and then settled in Israel. She worked as a physical education teacher, and then became the head coach of the Israeli national gymnastics team.
Keleti could return home to Hungary only for the 1983 World Athletics Championships.
Agnes Keleti has been honored with a series of prestigious awards from Hungary and Israel, having become one of the 12 “Athletes of the Nation” of Hungary.
Now she jokes that due to her age she is not allowed to do the splits.
I feel good. I try not to look at myself in the mirror. Maybe that’s why I’m staying young, she says.