Agnes Keleti, the oldest living Olympian and Holocaust survivor

Agnes Keleti turned 100 on January 09, 2021 and her years tell a lot more than they could prove. She was born in a small town in Hungary and at 16 she is already in the national athletics team, ready to participate in the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo. A wonderful dream that could have come true were it not that she is Jewish and under the Nazi regime she was estranged from the team she had to hide in the countryside, working as a maid with a fake ID identifying her as a Christian, while her family was deported to Auschwitz he never came out of here.

After the end of the Second World War, she was forced to miss the 1948 Olympics in London due to an injury but she trained hard to participate in the 1952 Games in Helsinki where she won 4 medals, one of which gold. . Agnes was 31 years old and in gymnastics she is already considered an advanced age but she doesn't give up and she really has a lot of energy and so she decides to train for another 4 years and participate in the Melbourne Olympics in Australia in 1956.

Agnes defeats the field: she wins 6 medals, 4 of which gold (free body, beam, asymmetrical parallels and test with tools) rivaling the Soviet Larisa Latynina, the woman with the most medals in the history of the Games. Eventually they will win the same number of medals. In those times between Hungary and the Soviet Union the tension was very high: Hungary had fought to obtain freedom from the foreign army and this conflict was also carried among athletes, competing not only for pure sporting competition but also for serious reasons politicians. Luckily there are no accidents and Agnes Keleti's Hungary gets a satisfying result and number of medals won.

After the Melbourne Olympics, she Agnes dedicates herself to teaching gymnastics, transmitting a love for the discipline that has helped her to be strong during the dark times of war and she will continue to teach as long as her age allows. . Today Agnes is 100 years old but she has on her face and in her eyes the look of someone who has a thousand. In her career she won 5 golds, 3 silvers and 2 bronzes at the Olympics and at the 1954 Rome World Cup she won 1 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze.

An example of professionalism and desire for redemption, in a historical period not easy for athletes she managed to distinguish herself and immediately became a legend for future generations. A giant of the sport that decades ago still talk about itself, 100 candles and yet always so smiling, a lover of life when this often seemed to get out of hand. A woman of the past one could say but unfortunately women like this are increasingly rare