Bobsledding for Israel

Adam “AJ” Edelman — who expects to bobsleigh for Israel in this month’s Olympics in Iraly and is thought to be the first Orthodox Jew to compete in the Winter Olympics — started his Olympic journey in 2014 in Lake Placid with skeleton, a single-person sliding sport, not bobsleigh.

“Skeleton was [a] bobsleigh qualification,” Edelman recalled. “No one was ever going to join me on the bobsled road or help fund it if I didn’t have a background to say ‘I’ve done it’.”

Jewish bobsledders have competed, and won, for the United States at the Olympics. “They had such phenomenal success, but the impact could only be felt if it was [for] Israel,” he said.

Edelman’s initial scouting report from his trial run at Lake Placid said that he would never make the Olympics. He would “get down the track, but that’ll be the most of it,” the report said.

That lit an internal fire to qualify anyway.

Despite saying how much he disliked skeleton, he qualified for the 2018 Olympics and finished 28th. He then quit the sport. But he had proven that Israel could qualify and compete in an Olympic sliding event.

He then assembled a bobsleigh team to compete in the 2022 Olympics. Most of the people he contacted to join the team thought it was a scam, he said. The team finished 0.1 seconds short of qualifying.

Edelman didn’t quit after 2022. He felt indebted to Israel for saving his life — twice.

As a child living with depression, he visited Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War, spending most of the summer in bomb shelters, reflecting on his struggles with school and life.

He used the experience as motivation to set goals to go to college, turn his life around and become a better person, he said.

Then Israel saved his life a second time. During a gap year in Israel after high school, he was still struggling with depression and became obese.

“You promised yourself back in 2006 that you were going to be the best version of yourself — that you were going to be something in life,” he recalled telling himself. “Right now, you can’t see your toes.”

Edelman lost about 35 pounds in three months, took the SAT subject tests in Israel and got accepted to MIT.

“Israel saved my life, basically twice,” he told JNS. “That’s something that I’ll always be indebted to Israel for, and because of that, everything is only for Israel.”

The Boston-born athlete, who grew up in a Modern Orthodox home, said he “never wanted to be an Olympian. For me, the Olympics are a tool, and they’re a tool of changing how the Jewish community views itself in sport.”

His passion is getting young Jewish kids involved in sports.

The Israeli Olympics program asked him to compete for the Jewish state’s hockey team, but the former goalie for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team decided that he could have more impact at bobsleigh.

That’s one of the hardest Olympic events for which to qualify.

Either two or four athletes must guide the cylindrical sled down an ice track at more than 90 miles an hour. One wrong move can crash the sled, slamming it and its occupants into walls or capsizing it until gravity brings it to a halt. 

The sport requires immense funding and training. Edelman said that the United States likely spent more than $8 million on its program for this year’s Olympics.

Team Israel had fewer funds and resources than other countries do, but Edelman wanted to help prove that the Jewish state could accomplish something that could seem impossible.

The hardest part about being an Orthodox athlete is finding protein, he told JNS, but he feels that his Jewish identity gives him a purpose. 

“You’re constantly reminded that you’re part of am Yisrael,” Edelman said.

The athlete said that he prays every night before going to sleep and asks that he represent Jews well on the world stage.

If Oct. 7 “has taught us anything, it’s just reinforced the inescapable fact that we’re all part of the talent stream of the Jewish people,” Edelman said.

“Against all odds, no one gave us a shot,” he said, noting that Israel wasn’t thought to be competitive in bobsleigh.

“We had no money and no organizational support. Everything was stacked against us. The war prevented us from having a team for a couple of years — like a consistent four-man team — but we stuck through it, and we did it.”

American fans shouldn’t feel any conflict between rooting for him and rooting for Team USA, he said.

“I don’t think people need to be torn on who to root for,” he said. The Israeli team stands for the “absolute standard of excellence for which everyone should be proud.”

He recommends that Americans root for Team USA to medal, and for Israel to perform very well.

Edelman told JNS that he thinks that Jewish communities tend to value things like music lessons above children’s sports when it comes to important parts of young people’s development and self-expression. He doesn’t think it should be that way.

“For some kids, sport is the best outlet to learn right from wrong, setting goals, dealing with loss and dealing with victory,” he said. “It’s such an important tool and developmental platform, but we neglect it because we don’t see the value in it.”

“We don’t see the value in it, because we don’t have enough role models,” he told JNS. “We don’t have enough role models, because it’s a self-perpetuating cycle of depressing participation.” 

His own sports path from ice hockey to bobsleigh, rather than the more natural speed skating, is an important message to others, he thinks.

“If I take the impossible and make it work, it’s a much more powerful and potent result to go to kids and say, ‘Hey I was the worst when I started’,” said. “‘You can be no worse than me. So wherever you are now, you can make it work and you can make it happen.’”

Beyond the personal obstacles that Edelman overcame, the current Israeli bobsled team faces its own challenges.

Some members were reservists in the Israeli military, and the team couldn’t come together in full until after the war.

“What the team has done is so remarkable — to knock off countries that trained together for four, eight, 12 years,” Edelman told JNS, and they’ve done so in the aftermath of Oct. 7. “That’s just one of the things that we do,” he said.

He hopes that fans will take away from the team’s achievement that Jews “really can do anything.”

Israel knocked off Czechia to qualify, and it is one of 28 sleds from 18 countries to make this year’s games in Milan.

So what will the future, after the games, hold for the Orthodox athlete?

Edelman plans to find a job and hopes to coach bobsleigh, but he won’t compete in any future Olympics after this one.

He told JNS that he has just some 24 days left of wearing the Israeli flag “on my chest and saying that I represent the country and people of Israel in a very particular way.”

He’s sad to approach the end of this chapter, he said, but is excited for what’s next, and he intends to hand off the baton — to mix sports metaphors — to the next generation of Israeli bobsledders.