Ágnes Keleti

Ágnes Keleti medal table
Gymnast
Hungary
Olympic games
gold	1952 Helsinki	Floor exercise
silver	1952 Helsinki	Team ranking
bronze	1952 Helsinki	Uneven bars
bronze	1952 Helsinki	Group gymnastics
gold	1956 Melbourne	Floor exercise
gold	1956 Melbourne	Uneven bars
gold	1956 Melbourne	Balance beam
gold	1956 Melbourne	Group gymnastics
silver	1956 Melbourne	All-around
silver	1956 Melbourne	Team ranking
World Championship
gold	1954 Rome	Uneven bars
silver	1954 Rome	Team ranking
bronze	1954 Rome	Balance beam

Ágnes Keleti (born June 9, 1921 in Budapest ) is a former Hungarian gymnast . With five Olympic gold medals, she is one of the most successful female athletes.

Life

The daughter of Jewish parents began doing gymnastics at the age of four. At sixteen she won the first of her ten Hungarian championship titles. In 1940 she should have participated in the Olympic Games in Helsinki, which were canceled due to the war. Instead, as a Jew, she was excluded from her gymnastics club. She survived the Second World War disguised as a Christian maid in a Hungarian village. When the Red Army approached, they went back to Budapest and worked in an ammunition factory there. Her father was murdered in Auschwitz, her mother and sister survived in a Swedish house with papers from Raoul Wallenberg's organization .

After World War II, Keleti resumed gymnastics but missed the 1948 Olympics due to an injury. Four years later, at the age of 31, she took part in the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki . In the team classification, the Hungarians took second place behind the team from the Soviet Union. Ágnes Keleti took sixth place in the all-around competition and was the second best gymnast in her team behind third-placed Margit Korondi . In terms of individual equipment, she took 4th place on the balance beam, 3rd place on the uneven bars and won gold in floor exercise. In the horse jump she was 41st and therefore missed a better place in the all-around competition. In group gymnastics, Keleti won bronze with the Hungarian team behind the Swedes and the Soviet team.

The Hungarian uprising took place at the end of October 1956 . The Hungarian team at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne was especially celebrated by exiled Hungarians when it competed in a direct duel with the team from the Soviet Union. Exactly in this role was Ágnes Keleti with the Hungarian team. The Hungarian team won silver, 1.3 points behind. In the device finals, Keleti won on the uneven bars and the balance beam. On the floor she won gold together with the Russian Larissa Latynina . In the horse jump, her weakest discipline, she came in 23rd place, 0.7 points behind Latynina, who also won the all-around competition, 0.3 points ahead of Keleti. At the end of the competition, the Hungarian team won the group gymnastics ahead of the Swedes.

After the Olympics, Keleti did not return to Hungary, but applied for political asylum in Australia. After her mother and sister had also managed to leave Hungary, they all moved on to Israel. Ágnes Keleti taught there for 29 years at the Wingate Institute , the Israeli sports university in Netanya . After her marriage to the journalist Robert Biro, who had fled Hungary, she became the mother of Daniel and Rafael.

In 2002, Ágnes Keleti was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame . In 2017, she received the Israel Prize , the highest award from the State of Israel.

literature

• Erich Kamper , Bill Mallon : Who's Who of the Olympic Games 1896–1992. Who's Who at the Olympics. Agon Sportverlag, Kassel 1992 ISBN 3-928562-47-9
• Volker Kluge : Summer Olympic Games. The Chronicle II. London 1948 - Tokyo 1964. Sportverlag, Berlin 1998 ISBN 3-328-00740-7
• Bernhard Tore: The Jewish gymnastics legend in "Jungle." Supplement to jungle world , 31, 2 August 2018, p. 16f. (with picture from 1960). Can also be read online.

Web links

• Ágnes Keleti in the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame (English)
• Ágnes Keleti in the database of the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (English)
• Ágnes Keleti in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Whatever happened to Agnes Keleti (HUN) ( Memento from October 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ^ "The great Olympia Lexicon", sports picture from June 19, 1996, p. 41
   AGNES KELETI (KLEIN) in the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame
2. ^ Holocaust survivor, 10-time Olympic medalist Agnes Keleti awarded the Israel Prize. i24news , February 15, 2017, accessed July 8, 2017 .