Gymnast Agnes Keleti won 10 Olympic medals over three Olympiads, including 5 gold medals. She ranks third all-time among women athletes for most Olympic medals and fourth all-time as a winner of Olympic gold medals.
A budding champion on the eve of World War II, Keleti’s Olympic hopes were scotched when the 1940, then 1944 Games were cancelled. Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in 1944 and Keleti’s father and other relatives were sent to Auschwitz where they perished. The gymnast hid out using the papers of a Christian woman while her mother and sister went into hiding and escaped a similar fate with the aid of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who provided documents permitting them to stay in a safe house in Hungary.
After the war, Keleti resumed her gymnastics quest, but a last minute injury prevented her from competing at the 1948 Olympic Games in London. Nonetheless, the Hungarian team earned a silver medal.
At the 1952 Olympics, now the ‘ancient’ gymnastics age of 31, Keleti won her first Olympic gold medal in Floor Exercises, plus bronze medals in Team Hand Apparatus and Uneven Parallel Bars, plus a Team silver medal. She also finished sixth in the Individual All-Around.
Between Olympics, Keleti captured three medals at the 1954 World Championships, winning the Uneven Bars gold medal, a silver medal in Team Exercises (portable apparatus), and a bronze on the Balance Beam.
At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, the 35 year and 11 month-old Keleti won four gold and two silver medals––golds on the Balance Beam, Parallel Bars, Free Standing event (tie) and Team Combined Exercises (portable apparatus); silvers in the Individual All-Around (missing the gold medal by thirty one-hundredths of a point), and Team Combined Exercises (nine exercises).
Following the Games, the Olympic champion did not return home. Instead, she defected to the West. (1956 was the year of the major Hungarian Revolution, an uprising against the ruling Communist government.) She lived in Israel since 1957 and served as a coach for the Israeli gymnastics team. She returned to her native Hungary in 1016 and lived there until her death in 2025.
From 1947 to 1956, Keleti won the All-Around Hungarian championships ten times.
In 2002, Keleti was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame. She is the most successful Jewish female athlete in Olympic history. Only one Jewish male athlete owns more Olympic honors than Keleti‘s 10 medals––swimmer Mark Spitz, who captured 11 Olympic medals.
