MILAN — The first-ever Israeli bobsled team in Olympic history runs this week at these 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Games.
Five Jews, a Druze and a dog. The dog, Lulu, will not be in the sled.
Even by the standards of the 2026 Winter Olympics, where the unusual has become the norm, the Israeli bobsled team stands out. Just — for being here.
Five Jews, a Druze and Lulu the dog here at the Milano-Cortina Games // X / @realajedelman
“Sports are the universal language,” pilot and team captain AJ Edelman said in an interview before the Games, adding, “It is incredibly beneficial to present normalcy from a country that generally makes news for negative reasons.”
The opening ceremony at Milan’s iconic San Siro stadium brought boos when the Israeli team was announced. A few days ago, a worker at one of the official Milano-Cortina 2026 merchandise stations yelled, “Free Palestine!” at Israeli fans.
“Representing the state of Israel is everything to us,” Edelman said as part of a post Sunday afternoon from Israel’s official X account, run by its foreign ministry. “Without the flag we’re just a bunch of crazy guys going down the trash can down the mountain.”
Former pole vaulter Uri Zisman, who typically rides in the four-man sled, told Associated Press a few days ago, “My mom says to me, ‘Isn’t it dangerous that you’ll have a Star of David on your back?’
“I say, no, mom, that’s what we do. We do the best we can.’”
Edelman with an observation Sunday on X // @realajedelman
This week makes for something of a moment for Israel and big-time sports — a combination that, and this has been Edelman’s point all along, is not often in the same sentence. The Israeli Deni Avdija, who plays for the Portland Trail Blazers, is in Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles.
There is layer upon layer to the story of the Israeli bobsled team and, for that matter, how Edelman essentially willed this to happen.
To the extent most people know anything about bobsled, it’s because of the 1993 movie Cool Runnings, about the Jamaican bobsled team. The 2026 Israeli sleds have been dubbed Shul Runnings — shul the Yiddish word for synagogue.
“One of the things you learn when you make your first Games is that there are very few true things about Cool Runnings,” Edelman says now.
All the same, he likes to quote this line from the movie, from the late John Candy as coach Irv Blitzer: “A gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”
Man with a plan: AJ Edelman // Getty Images/ IOC
American-born, 34, Edelman, now based in the coastal Israeli town of Netanya, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, is believed to be the first Orthodox Jew (kosher, Saturday rules, more) to compete at the Winter Olympics. After Monday’s races, when the men’s bobsled competition goes official, he will be a two-time Olympian — he ran in skeleton at the 2018 Games in PyeongChang, South Korea — and Israel’s first multi-sport Olympian.
Ward Fawarseh, a former rugby player, is likely to go in four-man. He would be the first Druze athlete to compete for Israel at the Winter Games. ”I’m representing the whole community. I’m very proud,” Fawarseh said in an interview, adding, “It’s a significant milestone.”
Edelman grew up around Boston, a kid with scoliosis and poor balance, in a religiously observant Jewish home. Younger brother Alex is an Emmy Award-winning comedian.
AJ Edelman went to MIT. There he played hockey.
In 2014, after earning an MIT degree in mechanical engineering, Edelman took it upon himself to compete for Israel at a skeleton race in Lake Placid, New York. He had almost no experience. It showed — he finished 18.64 seconds back, an eternity. The scouting report said AJ Edelman would never be competitive: “No Tom Brady.”
Give up?
Edelman doubled down and, watching hours of YouTube videos to learn how it was done, qualified for the 2018 Games in Korea.
This, though, short-circuits the way he earned — stress, earned — that 2018 spot.
Edelman’s 2018 Olympic ring. The Hebrew inscription says, ‘For myself, for my people, for my country’ // JewishLink
His first out-of-college job was at Oracle, in Redwood Shores, California, as a project manager. A work-from-home deal meant he could — and did — fly Wednesdays to Calgary to train and fly back Sundays to California. “All the while up to 2, 3 a.m taking calls with my people in India,” he said.
Needing to do well (enough) late in 2018 qualifying, Edelman earned a fifth-place in races back in Lake Placid.
In Korea, he finished 28th. Of 30. He beat a guy from Jamaica and another from Ghana.
The skeleton thing, Edelman says now, was always a bridge to bob. In skeleton, racers go face-first, alone, down the track. Bobsled is a two- or four-man event.
“I was starting down the barrel of what was going to be a horrific journey,” Edelman said. “I knew it would be one of the worst things I would ever do in terms of personal output and pain.”
The bobsled journey started in 2020, and not in Redwood Shores or Calgary or Lake Placid but back in Korea. Near PyeongChang.
Edelman said he decamped to Korea with Fawarseh and two of Fawarseh’s cousins believing they had a funder — someone who promised to underwrite this adventure. The funding fell apart.
Now Edelman was in Korea with “these three Druze athletes,” as he put it, and he “couldn’t pay them a salary and [himself] live in a decent place.”
By then, Edelman had a new BFF — Lulu, a Shiba Inu, a breed of dog native to Japan.
“I stayed 20 minutes outside [PyeongChang] with Lulu,” he said, “with no warm water and no heat. PyeongChang is freezing. Lulu and I were cooped up that entire winter,” no mattress, sleeping on the cold floor, “basically shivering on the floor every night.”
The goal was Beijing 2022. The Israeli team finished precisely one-tenth of a second out of a spot.
Edelman’s 2023 vow, written on a napkin on a plane flight: ‘This team is going to make it’ // X / @realajedelman
So it was Milano-Cortina 2026. Four more years.
Edelman is crystal clear that, for him, the Games are the means to an end in which there’s a new perspective — parents, kids, funding, infrastructure — on sport not just in Israel but among millions of Jews scattered around the world. To make clear it’s seen more widely as what he called a “viable path.”
The only way the path to 2026 got to viable is that Edelman’s fundraising reached levels — perhaps the right word is the depths — of absurdity. Who in financial circles would believe an Israeli bobsled team was a thing?
“Every single time I tried to raise money over the last 11 years, 12 years, in Israel and the [global] Jewish community, I was treated as a joke,” he said. “All the sports teams’ owners, people would say, speak to him and him and him.”
Which, by the way, made perfect sense, especially because in the years in and around Beijing 2022, Edelman was going to the Yale business school — contacts, contacts, contacts — graduating with his MBA in 2023.
“They would laugh,” he said, meaning when he spoke to wealthy would-be investors. “As if it was a total pipe dream.”
Edelman made money driving for Uber, in an old Honda Fit. A bit of money he got when his grandfather passed in 2021 went to bobsledding. His parents helped. “It’s a lot of sources you have to pull from,” he said.
In the fall of 2023, the team was supposed to kick off its qualifying run for these Games.
Then came Oct. 7. Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages to Gaza.
Most of the bobsled team got called up to war.
With Fawarseh, Edelman put together a new team: shot-putter Menachem Chen, sprinter Omer Katz and Zisman, the pole vaulter.
As a coach, a CrossFit athlete, Itamar Shprinz.
Shprinz told AP he had no idea what bobsled was: “I knew in the back of my head it was something about sleds and winter sports, but not what you needed to do in the sport.”
This winter, the Israelis edged closer and closer to qualifying. Last month, back in Lake Placid, they clinched an Olympic spot. Britain opted not to take one of its two allocated spots. Israel was next in line.
Still, there would be more drama. Days before the start of the Games, the apartment in Prague the team was using to wrap up training was broken into. Lost, Edelman said then on X, were suitcases, shoes, equipment, money, passports.
There was no forced entry, Edelman said in an interview, adding, “We don’t know exactly who did it but I have a very strong suspicion because people knew we were there and knew we were out.”
A two-man training run at the Games // Getty Images / Stefano Rellandini
The two-man runs go Monday and Tuesday. The four-man goes Saturday and Sunday.
The idea that a bunch of Jews and a Druze would win a medal here is even more out there than the idea of an Israeli team being in the bobsled in the first instance. In two-man, for instance, the Israeli sled has consistently finished this season in the 20s.
“The Olympics were the platform to accomplish the goal,” Edelman said, adding, “This was supposed to be the proof of concept — for Jews and Israelis to see themselves represented in sport, and say, ‘That’s amazing.’”
Amazing is perhaps an understatement.
The president of Israel’s Olympic committee, Yael Arad, who knows all about about first ever, Israel’s first-ever Olympic medalist, a silver in judo at the 1992 Barcelona Games, said Sunday, “If you dare to dream and you’re willing to take the journey, anything is possible.
“This [bobsled] story brings a lot of resilience. If you connect it to the times we are living in, all these challenges for Jewish people, this resilience — you can make anything happen — should go with all of us to any space in life. We shouldn’t be afraid. We shouldn’t be shy.
“Everything,” she said softly, “is possible.”