TEL AVIV (AP) — Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme. Get on up, Israel, it's bobsled time!
A handful of diverse athletes — a pole-vaulter, sprinter, shot-putter, rugby player, and former Olympian in skeleton — will compete as Israel's first bobsled team during this year's Milan Cortina Winter Games, unlikely ambassadors of their diplomatically isolated nation.
Most of these guys had never touched a sled before this season. Their leader, AJ Edelman, is believed to be the first Orthodox Jew to ever compete in a Winter Games. Another founding member of the team, Ward Farwaseh, will likely to be the first Druze Olympian.
Their 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.
The athletes say they are proud to represent Israel. They hope to be role models for young Israeli athletes and lay the groundwork for future gold in the sport.
“I used to be at the bottom of the pack athletically, and I made it here to the Olympics, so there must be some self-selection process,” said Edelman, speaking to AP from Italy. “I’m very sure that with this program now — with the infrastructure that has been set up — Israel will become a force in bobsled.”
As for how Edelman describes his long journey to Italy?
He puts his own spin on the 1993 movie “Cool Runnings,” based somewhat on the Jamaican bobsled team's Olympic team from 1988. Using the Yiddish word for synagogue, he says he is thinking of this one as “Shul Runnings.”
In 2014, a skeleton scout told Edelman, an American-Israeli from Brookline, Massachusetts with scoliosis and poor balance, that he was “no Tom Brady.” Defiant, the young Edelman took to YouTube, watching hours of tutorials and managing to qualify for the 2018 Olympics. He finished 28th of 30. Then began his headlong effort to bring a bobsled team together for the 2022 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?” he said.
He spammed the roster of Israel’s rugby team with Instagram messages. He eventually reached Fawarseh, from the Druze city of Majhar in northern Israel. There are just one million Druze, including 115,000 in Israel and 25,000 in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981.
Fawarseh had initially ignored Edelman's message, thinking it had to be a scam. Eventually he relented, joining with four others.
“I didn’t believe it. I didn’t even know that there was a Winter Olympics before, until I met AJ,” he said.
The team fell 0.1 second short of qualifying for Beijing so they set their sights on 2026.
Then, a week before the team was supposed to kick off its qualification run, Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and dragging some 250 hostages to Gaza. Israel vowed retaliation, drafting most of Edelman's teammates.
Fawarseh and Edelman put out a new call for athletes, pulling in Israeli shot-putter Menachem Chen, sprinter Omer Katz, pole vaulter Uri Zisman and Itamar Shprinz, a crossfit athlete, as coach.
Shprinz needed one important clarification before agreeing: What exactly was bobsledding?
"I knew in the back of my head it was something about sleds and winter sports, but not what you needed to do in the sport,” he said.
Two days later, Shprinz had a ticket to Europe, then Canada, where he first rode in the sled : “It was terrible, I passed out. It’s a hard sport."
The team clinched an Olympic spot at Lake Placid last month.
Israel is sending five other athletes to the Games, with figure skater Maria Seniuk, skiers Noa Szollos and Barnabas Szollos, cross-country skier Atila Mihaly Kertesz and skeleton athlete Jared Firestone joining the bobsledders.
“Leave in peace and return in peace,” wrote Yael Arad, chair of the Israel Olympic Committee and member of the International Olympic Committee, in a letter to Israeli Olympians this year. “You are carrying the torch of generations of Jewish and Israeli sports tradition, and every time you wave the Israeli flag, do so in the name of those who dreamed and did not arrive, those who are in our hearts forever.”
There were calls for Israeli athletes to be treated like their Russian counterparts, made to compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes," banned from wearing any national symbols or hearing anthems upon victory. The International Olympic Committee has said the legal reasons for acting against Russia have not been reached in Israel’s case, without explaining its reasoning.
“There was an athlete who told us in the summer that he would never represent Israel because ‘you don’t kill children.’ We’ve always known that those sentiments exist,” Edelman said. “On the team, we don’t modify the behavior too much. We’re proud.”
“My mom says to me, ‘Isn’t it dangerous that you’ll have a star of David on your back?’” Zisman added. “I say, no mom, that’s what we do. We do the best we can.”
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
FILE- Adam Edelman and Regnars Kirejevs, of Israel, compete in their second run during the two-man bobsled at the bobsledding world championships, Saturday, March 8, 2025, in Lake Placid, N.Y. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
Members of Israel's bobsledding team, from left, Uri Zisman, Omer Katz, AJ Edelman, Ward Farwaseh, Itamar Shprinz, pose at the Israel Olympic Committee headquarters, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026, in Tel Aviv, Israel, before their departure for the 2026 Winter Olympics. (AP Photo/Julia Frankel)
MOSCOW (AP) — The Kremlin said Thursday it regretted the expiration of the last remaining nuclear arms pact between Russia and the United States that left no caps on the two largest atomic arsenals for the first time in more than a half-century.
Arms control experts say the termination of the New START Treaty could set the stage for an unconstrained nuclear arms race.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last year declared his readiness to stick to the treaty’s limits for another year if Washington followed suit, but U.S. President Donald Trump has been noncommittal about extending it. He has indicated that he wants China to be a part of a new pact — something Beijing has rebuffed.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that Trump has made clear “in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile.”
Putin discussed the pact’s expiration with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Wednesday, noting the U.S. failure to respond to his proposal to extend its limits and saying that Russia “will act in a balanced and responsible manner based on thorough analysis of the security situation,” Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow views the treaty's expiration Thursday “negatively” and regrets it. He said Russia will maintain its “responsible, thorough approach to stability when it comes to nuclear weapons,” adding that "of course, it will be guided primarily by its national interests.”
With the end of the treaty, Moscow “remains ready to take decisive military-technical measures to counter potential additional threats to the national security,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
“At the same time, our country remains open to seeking political-diplomatic ways to comprehensively stabilize the strategic situation on the basis of equal and mutually beneficial dialogue solutions, if the appropriate conditions for such cooperation are shaped,” it said in a statement issued late Wednesday.
New START, signed in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, restricted each side to no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads on no more than 700 missiles and bombers — deployed and ready for use. It was originally supposed to expire in 2021 but was extended for five more years.
The pact envisioned sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance, although they stopped in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and never resumed.
In February 2023, Putin suspended Moscow’s participation, saying Russia couldn’t allow U.S. inspections of its nuclear sites at a time when Washington and its NATO allies have openly declared Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine as their goal. At the same time, the Kremlin emphasized it wasn’t withdrawing from the pact altogether, pledging to respect its caps on nuclear weapons.
In offering in September to abide by New START’s limits for a year to buy time for both sides to negotiate a successor agreement, Putin said the treaty's expiration would be destabilizing and could fuel nuclear proliferation.
New START was the last remaining pact in a long series of agreements between Moscow and Washington to limit their nuclear arsenals, starting with the SALT I in 1972.
Trump has indicated he would like to keep limits on nuclear weapons but wants to involve China in a potential new treaty.
“I actually feel strongly that if we’re going to do it, I think China should be a member of the extension,” Trump told The New York Times last month. “China should be a part of the agreement.”
In his first term, Trump tried and failed to push for a three-way nuclear pact involving China. Beijing has balked at any restrictions on its smaller but growing nuclear arsenal, while urging the U.S. to resume nuclear talks with Russia.
“China’s nuclear forces are not at all on the same scale as those of the U.S. and Russia, and thus China will not participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations at the current stage,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Thursday.
He said China regrets the expiration of New START, calls on the U.S. to resume nuclear dialogue with Russia soon, and respond positively to Moscow’s suggestion that the two sides continue observing the core limits of the treaty for now.
Peskov reaffirmed Thursday that Moscow respects Beijing's position. He and other Russian officials have repeatedly argued that any attempt to negotiate a broader nuclear pact instead of a U.S.-Russian deal should also involve nuclear arsenals of NATO members France and the U.K.
Arms control advocates bemoaned the end of New START and warned of the imminent threat of a new arms race.
“If the Trump administration continues to stiff-arm nuclear arms control diplomacy with Russia and decides to increase the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. deployed strategic arsenal, it will only lead Russia to follow suit and encourage China to accelerate its ongoing strategic buildup in an attempt to maintain a strategic nuclear retaliatory strike capability vis-a-vis the United States,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington. “Such a scenario could lead to a years-long, dangerous three-way nuclear arms buildup.”
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This version of the story corrects the last paragraph to say China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Beijing calls on the U.S. to respond positively to Moscow’s proposal to keep adhering to the treaty, not that China views it positively.
Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed.
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The Associated Press receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Outrider Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Additional AP coverage: https://apnews.com/projects/the-new-nuclear-landscape/
FILE - This photo released by the U.S. Air Force shows a B-52H Stratofortress approaching a KC-10 Extender for refueling over the Middle East, Sept. 4, 2022. (U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Shannon Bowman, via AP, File)
FILE - U.S. President Barack Obama, left, and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev, right, shake hands at a news conference at the Prague Castle in Prague, Czech Republic,, April 8, 2010, after signing the New START treaty reducing long-range nuclear weapons. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, File)
FILE - U.S. President Donald Trump greets Russian President Vladimir Putin, Aug. 15, 2025, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
FILE - This photo taken from a video distributed on Dec. 9, 2020 by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, shows a rocket launch as part of a ground-based intercontinental ballistic missile test at the Plesetsk facility in northwestern Russia. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)
