World’s oldest living Olympic champion, who is also a Holocaust survivor, Agnes Keleti will be celebrating her 100th birthday on Saturday, reported AFP.

The Hungarian gymnast said, “I feel good, but I don’t look in the mirror, that’s my trick! Then I remain young!”

The five-time Olympic champion is Hungary’s most successful gymnast, as well as one of the most decorated Jewish athletes in history.

Despite her advanced years being affected by her short-term memory, her feisty spirit remains intact. Keleti moved  in a sprightly manner around her apartment, where both her life mementoes and Olympic medals are on display, and joked about not being allowed to perform the full-leg splits anymore.

Also read: Considering emergency in Tokyo over ‘very severe’ third wave of COVID-19: Japan PM Suga

She said, “I’m told by my caretaker that it’s not good for me at this age,” as she went through a new book “The Queen of Gymnastics, 100 years of Agnes Keleti” published to mark her centenary birthday.

Keleti’s life story, which includes Olympic glory and Holocaust escape, is nothing short of a gripping Hollywood story.

Out of her 10 gymnastics medals, she won most after she turned 30 and was competing against gymnasts half her age, including five golds in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956).

In 2016, she told AFP, “I did sport not because it felt good but to see the world.”

Called up to the national team in 1939, she won her first Hungarian title the next year, but later in 1940 was barred from taking part in any sporting activity due to her Jewish background.

After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, she escaped deportation to a death camp by getting false documents and assuming the identity of a maid girl Piroska Juhasz.

“I stayed alive thanks to Piroska with whom I swapped not only clothes and papers, but also the way she talked,” said Keleti, who kept fit while hiding in the countryside by regular running.

Keleti’s father and several members of her family were killed in Auschwitz, while her mother and brother were rescued thanks to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

Keleti emigrated to Australia in 1957 a year after Hungary’s failed anti-Soviet uprising, before settling in Israel where she married a Hungarian sports teacher Robert Biro in 1959, with whom she later had two children.

After she retired from competition, she worked as a physical education teacher, and became head coach of the Israeli national gymnastics team.

She was only able to return home to then-communist Hungary — where she has lived since 2015 — for the World Athletics championships in 1983.

“It was worth doing something well in life, considering the attention I have received, I get the shivers when I see all the articles written about me,” Keleti says.