CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Hours after thieves broke into their European training apartment and made off with passports, equipment, and thousands of dollars in belongings, Israel’s Olympic bobsled team did what they’ve been doing for years when obstacles block their path: they got back on the ice and pushed harder.
The robbery Saturday was just the latest setback for a squad that has spent nearly a decade clawing its way toward a goal most Israelis didn’t know existed—competing in bobsled at the Winter Olympics. The team is calling their journey “Shul Runnings,” a play on the 1993 film “Cool Runnings” about Jamaica’s underdog bobsled team. A shul is the Yiddish word for synagogue, the Jewish house of worship and community gathering.
AJ Edelman, the Orthodox Jewish pilot driving both Israel’s two-man and four-man sleds, posted on social media that the team’s response to the robbery exemplified the Israeli spirit. “Such a gross violation—suitcases, shoes, equipment, passports stolen, and the boys headed right back to training today,” he wrote. Local police opened an investigation, but the team refused to let criminals derail years of work.
The apartment was not in Italy, where official training begins Thursday in Cortina d’Ampezzo. The team has been preparing across Europe but requested the exact location remain undisclosed. Some members haven’t yet arrived in Italy and won’t leave their training base until this week.
Israel qualified for bobsled at these Milan Cortina Games only after Britain declined one of its two allocated spots. Israel was next in line and seized the opportunity when the slot opened. This marks the first time Israel will compete in Olympic bobsled, fielding both two-man and four-man teams. Edelman, who competed in skeleton—the head-first sliding sport—at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, is believed to be the first Orthodox Jew ever to compete at a Winter Olympics. His teammate Ward Fawarseh is likely the first Druze Olympian.
The path to Italy has been anything but smooth. In 2014, a skeleton scout told Edelman, an American-Israeli from Brookline, Massachusetts with scoliosis and poor balance, that he was “no Tom Brady.” Edelman responded by spending countless hours on YouTube watching tutorials, teaching himself the sport well enough to qualify for the 2018 Olympics, where he finished 28th of 30. Then he set his sights on assembling a bobsled team for the 2022 Beijing 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?” Edelman said.
He spammed Israel’s rugby team roster with Instagram messages until he reached Fawarseh, from the Druze city of Majhar in northern Israel. The Druze are a religious minority numbering just one million worldwide, including 115,000 in Israel and 25,000 in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed in 1981.
Fawarseh initially dismissed Edelman’s message as a scam. “I didn’t believe it. I didn’t even know that there was a Winter Olympics before, until I met AJ,” he said. Eventually he joined, along with four others. The team came within 0.1 seconds of qualifying for Beijing. They regrouped and aimed for 2026.
Then, one week before the team was set to begin its qualification campaign, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, massacring approximately 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 hostages to Gaza. Israel’s subsequent war against the terror group has killed more than 71,800 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, a figure that doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. Most of Edelman’s teammates were drafted into military service.
Fawarseh and Edelman issued a new call for athletes. Israeli shot-putter Menachem Chen, sprinter Omer Katz, and CrossFit athlete Itamar Shprinz joined the reconstituted squad. Shprinz, now the team coach, was present at or near the robbery site, though it remains unclear whether he witnessed the theft.
Israel has never won a Winter Olympics medal, despite claiming 20 at the Summer Games. That’s unlikely to change this year. Nine Olympians and one Paralympian will represent Israel at Milan Cortina, competing in a geopolitical climate where Israel’s presence in international sports has sparked boycotts, bans, and protests over the Gaza war. At Friday’s opening ceremony in Milan, Israel’s delegation was met with scattered boos as they walked into San Siro stadium.
Security remains a paramount concern, just as it was at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. Eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games. The International Olympic Committee refused for 49 years to honor them at opening ceremonies, finally paying tribute at the delayed 2021 Tokyo Games. At December’s Olympic torch relay, Italian police stopped pro-Palestinian activists from disrupting the proceedings. More protests are expected in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.
“We feel the responsibility on our shoulders and the privilege of continuing to fly the Israeli flag in every location, and global sport is an incredible opportunity for that,” Yael Arad, president of the Olympic Committee of Israel, told reporters in December. “We will be one of 90-something countries there, and we’re very proud of that.”
Israel is not a winter country. It doesn’t specialize in snow sports. But this bobsled team—Orthodox Jews, Druze, athletes who learned their sport from YouTube and Instagram direct messages, men who traded military service for Olympic dreams and then traded back—proves that the absence of mountains doesn’t mean the absence of will. They’ve been robbed, rejected, and relegated to the margins. And they’re still pushing that sled down the ice, still flying the blue and white flag in the frigid wind, still refusing to accept that a desert nation has no place on a frozen track.
