By JULIA FRANKEL, Associated Press
TEL AVIV (AP) — Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme. Get on up, Israel, it’s bobsled time!
A handful of diverse athletes — a pole-vaulter, sprinter, shot-putter, rugby player, and former Olympian in skeleton — will compete as Israel’s first bobsled team during this year’s Milan Cortina Winter Games, unlikely ambassadors of their diplomatically isolated nation.
Most of these guys had never touched a sled before this season. Their leader, AJ Edelman, is believed to be the first Orthodox Jew to ever compete in a Winter Games. Another founding member of the team, Ward Farwaseh, will likely to be the first Druze Olympian.
Their participation comes at a time when Israel’s presence in international sports has been met with boycotts, bans and backlash over the humanitarian toll of the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 71,800 Palestinians, according to the territory’s health ministry, and devastated the strip.
The athletes say they are proud to represent Israel. They hope to be role models for young Israeli athletes and lay the groundwork for future gold in the sport.
“I used to be at the bottom of the pack athletically, and I made it here to the Olympics, so there must be some self-selection process,” said Edelman, speaking to AP from Italy. “I’m very sure that with this program now — with the infrastructure that has been set up — Israel will become a force in bobsled.”
As for how Edelman describes his long journey to Italy?
He puts his own spin on the 1993 movie “Cool Runnings,” based somewhat on the Jamaican bobsled team’s Olympic team from 1988. Using the Yiddish word for synagogue, he says he is thinking of this one as “Shul Runnings.”
Told he’d never make it, he’s now a two-time Olympian
In 2014, a skeleton scout told Edelman, an American-Israeli from Brookline, Massachusetts with scoliosis and poor balance, that he was “no Tom Brady.” Defiant, the young Edelman took to YouTube, watching hours of tutorials and managing to qualify for the 2018 Olympics. He finished 28th of 30. Then began his headlong effort to bring a bobsled team together for the 2022 Games.
“It’s very tough for me to understand what would compel anyone else to want to get inside of basically a trash can and get kicked off the side of a mountain. Who does that?” he said.
He spammed the roster of Israel’s rugby team with Instagram messages. He eventually reached Fawarseh, from the Druze city of Majhar in northern Israel. There are just one million Druze, including 115,000 in Israel and 25,000 in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981.
Fawarseh had initially ignored Edelman’s message, thinking it had to be a scam. Eventually he relented, joining with four others.
“I didn’t believe it. I didn’t even know that there was a Winter Olympics before, until I met AJ,” he said.
The team fell apart after Oct. 7, 2023
The team fell 0.1 second short of qualifying for Beijing so they set their sights on 2026.
Then, a week before the team was supposed to kick off its qualification run, Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and dragging some 250 hostages to Gaza. Israel vowed retaliation, drafting most of Edelman’s teammates.
Fawarseh and Edelman put out a new call for athletes, pulling in Israeli shot-putter Menachem Chen, sprinter Omer Katz, pole vaulter Uri Zisman and Itamar Shprinz, a crossfit athlete, as coach.
Shprinz needed one important clarification before agreeing: What exactly was bobsledding?
“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,” he said.
Two days later, Shprinz had a ticket to Europe, then Canada, where he first rode in the sled : “It was terrible, I passed out. It’s a hard sport.”
The team clinched an Olympic spot at Lake Placid last month.
Israel’s participation in the Games comes amid backlash and boycotts
Israel is sending five other athletes to the Games, with figure skater Maria Seniuk, skiers Noa Szollos and Barnabas Szollos, cross-country skier Atila Mihaly Kertesz and skeleton athlete Jared Firestone joining the bobsledders.
“Leave in peace and return in peace,” wrote Yael Arad, chair of the Israel Olympic Committee and member of the International Olympic Committee, in a letter to Israeli Olympians this year. “You are carrying the torch of generations of Jewish and Israeli sports tradition, and every time you wave the Israeli flag, do so in the name of those who dreamed and did not arrive, those who are in our hearts forever.”
There were calls for Israeli athletes to be treated like their Russian counterparts, made to compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes,” banned from wearing any national symbols or hearing anthems upon victory. The International Olympic Committee has said the legal reasons for acting against Russia have not been reached in Israel’s case, without explaining its reasoning.
“There was an athlete who told us in the summer that he would never represent Israel because ‘you don’t kill children.’ We’ve always known that those sentiments exist,” Edelman said. “On the team, we don’t modify the behavior too much. We’re proud.”
“My mom says to me, ‘Isn’t it dangerous that you’ll have a star of David on your back?’” Zisman added. “I say, no mom, that’s what we do. We do the best we can.”
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