Agnes Keleti won 10 Olympic medals over three Olympiads,
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 and her mother
went into hiding and escaped a similar fate with the aide
of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who provided documents
permitting them to flee 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, she was awarded
a Team silver medal for having been a member of the runner-up
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.
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 36-year-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 a major Hungarian uprising against the ruling Communist
government.) She has lived in Israel since 1957, and served
as a coach for the Israeli gymnastics team.
From 1947 to
1956, Keleti won the All-Around Hungarian championships
In 2002, Keleti was inducted into the International
Gymnastics Hall of Fame. She is the most successful Jewish
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.