CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — AJ Edelman and Menachem Chen are in last place out of 26 sleds at the midway point of the Olympic two-man bobsled race at the Milan Cortina Games.
And they're thrilled.
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Israel competed in Olympic bobsled for the first time on Monday, and for Edelman and Chen that was more than enough to celebrate. They had the slowest starts and slowest finishes in both of their two heats and finished nearly five seconds — a massive gap in sliding — behind leader Johannes Lochner of Germany. They also had absolutely no complaints afterward.
"We are victors," Edelman said. "Not victims."
Edelman — a Boston native who also made Israeli sports history when he became the country's first Olympic skeleton competitor at the 2018 PyeongChang Games — has bucked long odds and paid big bills to make these quests happen.
Sliding isn't cheap and the pay isn't great even for the biggest names in the world. Edelman freely admits that he's not particularly fast, and the Israeli team doesn't have a full-time coach. The team had to sweat out just getting a berth in the Olympic field, then dealt with a robbery at the apartment they were using as a training base before coming to Italy.
Days like Monday make it all more than worthwhile, he said.
"I've been to the Games before. It's not the greatest thing in the world," said Edelman, who jumped out of his sled in celebration Monday, more proof that the result was irrelevant from his perspective. "But it is the greatest thing in the world to see your country represented, and some kid's going to see that, and they're going to go, 'You know what, I can start no worse than that guy, but I can do a lot better than that guy.' And he's going to start his journey.
"What's a better thing in the world to accomplish than that?"
Israel has 10 athletes at the Milan Cortina Olympics, six of them sliders. The country's participation comes at a time when Israel's presence in international sports has been met with boycotts, bans and backlash over the humanitarian toll of the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 71,800 Palestinians, according to the territory's health ministry, and devastated the strip.
Contending isn't a realistic expectation. Representing is the goal.
"I'm just here to make everybody watching proud, to represent not just Israel but all Jewish people around the world," Israeli skeleton athlete Jared Firestone — an attorney in South Florida — said last week during that competition. "That's what I'm here for. That's my message."
Edelman, believed to be the first Orthodox Jew to compete in the Winter Games, is leading a team that has a bunch of first-time sliders, after he helped recruit a rugby player and three track and field athletes to fill out the national team. Edelman and Chen will get one more run on Tuesday; they'll need what might be a mathematically impossible rally to get into the top 20 sleds and be assured of a fourth and final run of the two-man event.
Edelman will lead a team into the four-man event later this week as well. He said he thought about abandoning his plans to lead an Olympic bobsled team many times before his mother talked him out of it.
"We always want to be the first but not the last," Edelman said. "I was very sure that, if we didn't get it done, there would never be an Israeli bobsled team in the Games, because no one was going to fight for that. Now we've set a precedent. Others can come after us."
