By any conventional measure, AJ Edelman was not supposed to end up here: hurtling down an ice chute at 150 kilometres an hour, wrapped in a lycra one-piece, representing Israel at the Winter Olympics in Italy.
As a child, he was not athletic. As a teenager, he was lost. As a young adult, he was obese.
Yet the Brooklyn-born Orthodox 34-year-old will pilot a 630-kilogram bobsleigh down a frozen mountain this week. And he will do it because he owes his life to the Jewish state and wants to repay the debt at Olympic speed.
Speaking to the JC from an undisclosed location in Italy where he is deep in training mode, he says, “I’m competing for one reason and one reason only: to thank Israel for saving my life.”
Israel, he believes, saved him twice.
Israel's first Olympic bobsled team (Photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]
The first time came in the summer of 2006. Edelman was a listless boy visiting Israel when the Second Lebanon War broke out. He recalls weeks of sirens and bomb shelters, and it became the first time he had to confront the question of what life meant, and whether his would amount to anything.
The second came when he returned to Israel as a yeshivah student and hit what he describes as rock bottom.
One day, he looked in the mirror and saw an obese body he barely recognised. Something about being in Israel, he says, crystallised the feeling that he had to change track. “I had to change that version of myself.”
And he did change it.
He took the SATs, and was admitted to MIT, where he studied mechanical engineering, and lost weight. In 2016, Edelman made aliyah.
“When you land in Israel, you know it’s home,” he says. “It’s something spiritual. It opens you to a different depth of perception.”
Out of that gratitude to Israel grew a singular mission: to represent the Jewish State at the Winter Olympics.
It is an unlikely ambition, though perhaps less so in the Edelman family. One brother, Austin, is a chief technology officer, “the smart one”; the other, Alex, a comedian with a Netflix special, “the funny one.” That leaves AJ: the Olympian.
His original plan was not bobsleighing but speed skating.That was until he went to a five-day Olympic talent camp and met a coach for skeleton, the face-down solo descent sport. It did not go well. He tore his hamstring sprinting and failed the balance tests. At the end of the camp, the scout delivered a verdict.
“You’re not what we call athletic,” the scout told him. “You’ll never be competitive. You might get on the track, but you’ll never make the Olympics.”
Edelman with the team mascot, a Shiba Inu named Lulu (Photo: courtesy of the team)[Missing Credit]
Edelman replied, “That’s what they told Tom Brady,” referring to the American football star.
“AJ, you are no Tom Brady,” the scout said.
When Edelman received the brutal verdict, he felt something click. “The moment I got that report, I wanted to do it. I chose the sport because I was told I was garbage at it.” What Edelman lacked in natural aptitude, he compensated for with obsessive hard work and a bottomless appetite to prove the scout wrong.
Working as a product manager at the software company, Oracle, he would spend any free time watching hours upon hours of YouTube videos. When he’d learnt as much as he could online, he headed to the practice slope, hand over his credit card, and tell the staff to “just run it.” His days were 21 hours of work.
Skeleton, he discovered, was miserable. He broke a lot of bones – many ribs, his ankle. “Imagine hitting a wall at 90 kilometres an hour,” he explains.
But enduring the sport was part of a bigger plan for Edelman; skeleton was never the destination.“Bobsled was always the goal.”
An Israeli bobsleigh team, Edelman knew, would be symbolic.
Because the sport is prohibitively expensive – a four-man Olympic-calibre sleigh costs roughly $140,000; a two-man, about $60,000; there are only a handful of tracks worldwide, none in Britain, let alone Israel – he knew this would take time.
“Skeleton was step one: make the Games. Step two was bobsled. I needed to secure sponsorship and then build a team.”
And the plan worked. He competed in skeleton at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, then began calling sponsors and recruiting teammates. Slowly, improbably, a team came together.
Israel's first Olympic bobsled team, Uri Zisman, Omer Katz, AJ Edelman, Ward Fawarsy, Menachem Chen, Itamar Shprinz and team mascot, a Shiba Inu named Lulu (Photo: courtesy of the team)[Missing Credit]
Bobsleigh is a strange sport, and Edelman explains it with an engineer’s mind.
“The sled starts at rest, and the only engine is us,” he says. The race has two components: the push and the drive. He and the brakemen sprint for 30 to 50 metres, shove the sled forward, then leap inside. Then the pilot, Edelman, steers.
“The sled is like a car, except instead of wheels, it has very thick hockey blades.”
The objective is simple. Get to the bottom as fast as possible without crashing. The difficulty lies in controlling 630 kilograms of machinery and men travelling at over 150 kilometres an hour.
People have died doing this. Others have suffered devastating injuries.
Edelman mentions, almost casually, that a fellow competitor crashed during training earlier in the week and required surgery. “He can’t feel his hands now,” he says.
Yet fear is not the primary challenge; it’s physics. “It’s about whether your body can handle g-force,” he says. “There’s no padding. No seats. You’re sitting at the bottom of a trash can being launched off a mountain.”
For the teammates behind him, who cannot see where they are going, the experience requires total trust.
Three members of the team served in the Israel Defence Forces. “They’re used to adrenaline,” Edelman says. “And it creates a bond.”
That bond extends beyond the ice. Many Israelis have come face-to-face with anti-Israel sentiment abroad. Indeed, Edelman says the team has faced hostility within the bobsleighing world, and one fellow competitor called them “baby killers”.
But his response is characteristic. “We’re not victims, we’re victors” he tells his teammates. He pities people who live with that much hatred, “who has the energy to hate strangers all day?”
The same stoicism surfaced last week when the team’s training apartment in Italy was robbed. A passport and thousands of dollars were stolen. “It’s just another thing,” he says. “We’ll get through it.”
Shabbat presents a different kind of challenge. Bobsleigh competitions are often scheduled on Saturdays – and Edelman is observant. He doesn’t drive on Shabbat but says piloting a bobsleigh is different as it is sport.
“My bobsledding is in the spirit of Shabbat,” he says. He acknowledges that some observant Jews do not play sports on Shabbat, including himself when he was a boy, “but it doesn’t say anywhere that you can’t.” He has not consulted a rabbi.
Keeping kosher in the Italian training zone is another puzzle. “Protein is the hard part,” he says. He needs roughly 200 grams a day, another huge expense, “but there’s a good amount of smoked salmon in the Olympic Village and I brought protein powder.”
Edelman bristles at the stereotype that Jews do not do sports. “It’s wrong,” he says, and notes the obvious contradiction of the IDF, a highly effective army made up of Jews.
Edelman is the team pilot, meaning he is the only one who can see the track (Photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]
The problem, he argues, is visibility. “If a Jewish kid wants piano lessons, parents might end up spending tens of thousands of dollars on that. But if the kid wants to do archery or rock climbing, [the parents] will say there’s no career in that.” Without role models, investment never comes. “If you want to see change, you have to be the change,” he says.
Edelman has been cited as the first Orthodox athlete to compete at either Summer or Winter Olympics. He accepts the label with a promise: “I’m the first, but I won’t be the last.”
As competition approaches, his goals are precise.
In 20 or 30 years, an Israeli bobsleigh team will no longer be a curiosity. “It will just be normal.” And if a child somewhere sees what they are doing and feels inspired, Edelman says, the mission will have succeeded.
“I was never a superstar athlete, I was never Michael Phelps born to do sport, but I truly do think I was born to drive a bobsled for Israel – it is one of the best things to do in the world.”
If his team’s push time is within a tenth of a second of the leaders, Edelman believes he can drive them into the top 20, an Olympic final. Whatever the outcome, qualification alone is “a certifiable historical accomplishment.” Israel now ranks among the world’s top 28 bobsleigh teams.
As he launches himself headfirst down the ice, watched by anxious Jewish fans everywhere, that conviction will surely propel him forward.
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