Israel’s bobsleigh team has qualified for the Winter Olympics for the first time, to be held next month at venues across Lombardy and northeastern Italy.
Initially, the four-man team finished one slot shy of making the cut, but cleared it anyway after one of the qualifying teams, Great Britain, opted out of using its full allocation of athletes, opening the slots to the Israeli team.
The bobsleigh athletes finished high enough in the world rankings that Israel was next in line for a quota. Pilots and teams need to compete in several international races organised by the sport’s governing body, the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, to qualify for the Winter Olympics. Results from those races are tallied into the IBSF combined ranking lists that determine eligibility.
“Dreams do come true. For this dream, that day is today. The Israeli Bobsled Team is now ‘The Israeli Olympic Bobsled Team.’ We are headed to Milan,” pilot and team captain Adam “AJ” Edelman wrote on Instagram. He thanked his followers and added: “Let’s go make more history.”
For Israel, he wrote on X, “‘impossible’ is just something we do. Every day.”
The Olympic Committee of Israel called it a “historic achievement.”
Alongside Edelman, brakeman/push athletes Menachem Chen, Ward Fawarseh and Omer Katz will take on the bobsleigh, with Uri Zisman travelling as an alternate.
The qualification of the bobsleighers from Israel, a warm country where snow occurs regularly only for short periods in small, high-altitude areas, has drawn humorous comparisons to the plot of the 1993 comedy Cool Runnings, which follows a Jamaican bobsleigh team trying to qualify for a major international competition.
JNS