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The Israel Olympic Bobsledder Adam Edelman team seeks to bring their team back to the winter games for the first time from Pyeongchang in 2018.
If they qualify for Cortina-Milan next year, it would mark her return and her teammates at the Olympic Games after failing to qualify for Beijing in 2022. This would also mark his first trip to the Winter Games since their country was attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
“We were lucky to have a team ready to go on October 7 and when October 7 came, when it was perpetrated on Israel, each of them had to be called to war. It has therefore really changed the team’s dynamics in the past two years,” Edelman told PK Press Club Digital.
“The goal of the team after October 7 was to exist.”
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Adam Edelman of Israel slows down at the end of the Skeleton Heat 2 male skeleton during the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games, at the Olympic sliding center on February 15, 2018 in Pyeongchang, in South Korea. (Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images)
Edelman recalled that her team adapted to a new starter in each competition in which she participated, for a while.
During all this time, he had to live below the poverty line in order to maintain his commitment to lead the team for 12 years. He even said that he had to sell all his bitcoin, who, according to him, would have valid millions today if he stood there.
“Everything has been spent on bobslectricity,” he said. “I would be mega-millionaire if I still had it.”
Edelman admits could have made things easier if he, a native of the Massachusetts and a graduate of the MIT, competed for the American team instead of Israel.
In a sport so dependent on resources like Bobsledding, nicknamed F1 on ice due to its important costs to be competitive, Edelman knows that he would have had access to more resources for coaching, training, equipment and marketing.
However, for him, this would have defeated the point of competition as Olympian.
“I am not adding anything to the United States. If I had to join the United States, the only value that would have been added is to my own trip, but it makes my trip not additive to the trips of others,” said Edelman.
“My value for the world, and why God put me on this earth, I really feel is to use the skills he gave me to have a positive impact on others … So I am only motivated to represent Israel. I have thought about it a lot.”
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Adam Edelman of Israel reacts in the arrival area during the male skeleton rounds at the Olympic sliding center on February 16, 2018 in Pyeongchang-Gun, in South Korea. (Matthias Hangst / Getty Images)
However, Edelman is an American proud and believes that the United States is “the largest country to have ever existed in the history of humanity”.
In addition, as a Jewish American, Edelman is also proud to see President Donald Trump repressing the wave of anti -Semitism that had broken out after October 7. Edelman said he saw anti-Semitism closely when he went to Columbia during his pro-Palestinian demonstrations in 2024.
Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars in the universities of the Ivy Columbia and Harvard League, declaring that schools have violated the civil rights of Jewish students by allowing anti-Semitic demonstrations on the campus in the middle of the Israel-Gaza conflict in the last year and a half.
Harvard will not comply with the requests of Trump’s administrator in the midst of federal funding threats
The president even launched a specialized working group from the so -called justice department by Leo Terrell to solve the problem.
“The relevance of what the Trump administration has asked is to enforce the law. It is simply a question of saying” hey, these people are protected by the law on civil rights “and you do not apply in a blatant manner the law on civil rights. If people take over, intrusion, the security guards on your campus, harass the Jews on the way to the class, Jews, you would not make tolerate that for another group, “said the group,” said.
The Trump administration also announced earlier in April that it would stop more than a billion dollars in Cornell University and around $ 790 million for the Northwestern University in the midst of investigatives on alleged civil rights violations.
About 510 million dollars in Brown University could also be on the blockage, said a White House official at the Associated Press on April 3, due to anti -Semitism allegations at school.
“I think the way the Trump administration has discussed many problems since arriving at the office is exactly the right way,” said Edelman.
Adam Edelman of Israel takes off his helmet after a training session for the male skeleton during the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympic Winter Games, at the Olympic sliding center on February 14, 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea. (Mohd Rasfan / AFP via Getty Images)
“Some policies are good, some policies are bad, and it is an inexplicably good policy. Make sure that American higher education institutions do not continue this path towards being so inaccessible to Americans, but also indoctrination of anti-American values.”
While Edelman seeks to repel his team at the Winter Olympic Games in Cortina Milan in 2026, he aspires to be a voice for the Americans and the Jews in a complicated period of history.
He hopes that the rest of the story will be able to appreciate the history of the oppressed that he and his teammates are through.
