When the five members of AJ Edelman’s bobsled team were called up to fight in Gaza after Oct. 7, many expected that he would cancel the season and wait and train for next year.
However, as the pilot of the Israeli bobsled team, Edelman felt it was integral for his home to be represented on the international stage.
“The natural response to all this was to walk away,” Edelman told The Post. “That to me was unacceptable. It’s really important this year that the team continues to represent Israel.”
Without any of his teammates — bobsled competitions are two-man and four-man events — and the season starting less than a month after the war began, Edelman began the process of finding recruits to fill in for individual races, as each competition can be weeks apart.
None of the recruits had ever bobsledded before — some had never even heard of the sport. However, they all wanted to bring glory to their country and make sure Israel would still have a team.
Daniel Jackson, a New Jersey-based real estate agent who plays on Israel’s national football team, stepped up with two weeks’ notice to compete when a different recruit was injured.
“If I couldn’t make it to go over there, Team Israel couldn’t participate. I got this opportunity and thought it would be a great way to represent Israel,” Jackson told The Post.
Against the odds, Edelman’s group of athletes have prevailed. The Israeli team now ranks third on the North American circuit, which is composed of top global teams who compete on U.S. and Canadian tracks.
So far this season, Israel has won five medals and the country’s first podium finish.
“It’s truly representative of what can be accomplished when people really strive to represent their country,” Edelman said.
Like his new teammates, Edelman’s road to bobsledding has been untraditional.
The 32-year-old was recruited by Israel to play on their national hockey team after competing at MIT, but chose to pursue a job in tech instead.
After moving to Israel in 2016, he chose to pursue skeleton — a one-man sliding sport.
Edelman was given “the worst scouting report of any Olympic skeleton athlete in history” from the Lake Placid skeleton school, which determined that he would “never be competitive.”
For many athletes scouting reports can be crucial for getting sponsors. However, a la Tom Brady, Edelman ripped his up and wrote his own scouting report, training himself through watching 12 hours worth of YouTube videos daily. Eventually, Edelman qualified for and competed in the 2018 Olympics where he finished 28th.
During the pandemic, Edelman retired from skeleton and turned his focus to bobsled.
In a country where a large percentage of its population has never seen snow, curating a team willing to commit years of their life for bobsled was difficult.
However, Edelman recruited a mixture of Jewish and Arab Israelis and together, they missed Olympic qualifications by .1 seconds in 2022.
Now, his focus is on the 2026 Olympics in Milan though the challenges of competing in bobsled for Israel are numerous.
Edelman’s sled is the least-funded team on the competitive circuit and unlike most teams, the Israelis do not receive government funding or subsidies.
Each practice run is $70 and the team completes up to 250 a year. Coaching costs $50,000 on top of travel and lodging — elements that are subsidized for teams like the U.S. with national funding.
Since the war in Israel began on Oct. 7, the team has also lost three company sponsors who feared pushback over working with an Israeli sports team.
“There are far more drawbacks of sliding for Israel than sliding for any other country,” Edelman said. “But Israel is the reason to continue going and Israel is the only reason that I would ever do this. I was born Jewish, but I chose Israel. I would only compete for Israel.”
Bobsled is a full-time job for Edelman between the hours of practice, recruitment, and most importantly, fundraising. He spends most of the year raising money out of the Manhattan apartment of his brother, Broadway comedian Alex Edelman, often working odd jobs like driving for Uber for funds.
He is aided by Israeli skeleton champion Jared Firestone. They seek company sponsors and private donations to help cover some of the cost of competition.
A former track athlete at Tulane, Firestone retired from competitive sports in 2012. A year later, he had a mini stroke, which prompted his return to competitive sports.
“Life is short. After the stroke, I decided that I’ll pursue my original dream of being a professional athlete,” Firestone said.
After watching the 2014 Olympics, Firestone decided to learn to race skeleton and was quickly recruited by the U.S. development team. Firestone soon decided to compete for Israel instead, becoming Edelman’s successor after his 2018 Olympic run.
Firestone’s numerous jobs as a skeleton athlete are a far cry from his experience with Team USA.
“It’s going from having almost anything you could want — free housing, coaching, access to training equipment — to having nothing. I’m not just an athlete. I’m also a physiotherapist, coach, travel agent, sled mechanic,” he said.
Everyone involved with the program reiterated how important it was for them to see Israel succeed and to be ambassadors for their homeland.
“I come across many people each year who haven’t met any Jews before and have misconceptions. Sports does a better job than almost anything else at removing misconceptions just because of the unity between athletes. These are my rivals, we’re competing for the same Olympic spots, but at the end of the day, we relate to each other more than anyone else,” he said.
In lieu of advertisements this year, Firestone has been putting stickers of Oct. 7 hostages on his sled. Firestone felt a sense of pride that athletes and spectators came up to him and asked about the hostage situation and he could educate them on the developments.
For Ori Magnezi, his desire to succeed was driven by his loved one back home.
Magnezi, a CrossFit athlete and Israeli navy reservist, was reached out to by Edelman to fill in for a race in Calgary. Two days later, he flew to Canada to learn how to bobsled. While Magnezi tore his meniscus shortly after training began he rehabbed his injury for what became Team Israel’s medal-winning Park City race.
“Many close friends of mine were killed — some at the Nova festival and some in the war itself. It was not easy at all to leave my family and friends behind in order to do something like this. But I promised myself that I would do everything to bring a medal to Israel and to my friends who were killed, and it happened,” Magnezi said.
In 2026, Edelman has no doubts that his team will make it to the Winter Olympics based on their incredible performances over the past few years.
David Greaves, the current president of Bobsleigh Skeleton Israel and founder of the first Israeli bobsled team with former 49ers Super Bowl Champion John Frank, credits the Bostonite-turned-Israeli for bringing better talent to the program.
“Young Jewish athletes saw AJ with an Israeli flag on his back at the 2018 Olympics and thought ‘I can do that too.’ A lot of how our program has developed over the last six years has been, in part because we’ve been to the Olympic Games,” Greaves said.
Qualifying tournaments for the Olympics begin in Oct. 2025, leaving the next year for practice competitions. For now, Edelman continues to instill a sense of pride in what his team has accomplished.
“When we make the games in 2026, which I believe we will,” he said. “We’ll take a look back at this season and say that we can be truly, truly proud of what we’ve accomplished.”
