On an airplane cocktail napkin is a handwritten promise AJ Edelman wrote to himself on his way home from a competition last year.

“I will keep pushing. My boys and I will cross the finish line,” it reads toward the end. The note is signed Jan. 4, 2023, with the Olympic rings on the right side of the napkin.

Edelman competed in the 2018 Winter Olympics in the sliding sport skeleton. But these words are written about his pursuit of a new sport: bobsled.

Edelman is the pilot of a two-man and four-man bobsled team competing for Israel.

“The team means everything in my life,” he told NY1.                                                         

He wrote that note to push on, even after a tough 2023 season when a lack of funding limited him to racing only once during the season. But what he could never have foreseen is how difficult it would be to race this season at all.

“We were supposed to be up in Lake Placid October 13. So about a week before, [October 7] happened,” he said, referencing the deadly terrorist attack carried out by Hamas on Israelis.

Within a few days, everyone but Edelman on the bobsled team — all in Israel — were called to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces.

“How do you have a season without a team, right?” he said rhetorically. "Especially when the season starts in a week.”

Edelman is not allowed to serve because he became an Israeli citizen as an adult.

So he said he’s done it in different ways. In the fall, Edelman set up a table at Washington Square Park, offering coffee and snacks in exchange for honest, calm conversations about the decades of conflict in the Middle East.

"It's all part of allowing people to let their voices out," he said at the time in an interview with NY1, welcoming people with all views to talk face-to-face.

And it was around that time that he said he decided another way to support the country he loved was by continuing to compete.

He was starting from scratch to find a team to compete in the North American Cup, a bobsled circuit that gives teams with Olympic aspirations — and some that have already made it — a chance to compete.

Edelman now had to find anyone willing to join him for the season, which went from November to March.

“A lot of networking of talking to people and saying, ‘Do you know an athlete who is powerful, strong and fast?’” he said.

Edelman has to fundraise for the team. He said the budget for this season was $120,000, and that he gets no money from the National Olympic Committee of Israel. And now, he had to find anyone — anywhere — willing to try this sport, even for the first time.

Daniel Jackson is a real estate agent in New Jersey. Until the fall, he was playing professional football in Israel. That’s when he got an Instagram message from AJ Edelman.

“I wasn’t sure if it was real, if it was a joke,” he said from his home.  

Not once had Jackson touched a bobsled.

“Tell me not everything I need to know to like not get hurt and survive," he recalled saying. "And I’ll figure the rest out on my own.”

He was ready to try, thinking about all his teammates on the football team, now called into service.  

“I said what can I do personally to help out Israel," he said. "So this was a great way to go and honor and compete for Israel.”

Jackson was one of a handful of volunteers, ready to push a several hundred pound bobsled with Edelman while running full speed on ice. None of them had ever done it before.

“So every single race we had a brand new push athlete who needed to be trained and who needed to learn what running on ice felt like and what pushing a bobsled felt like,” said Edelman.

Jackson said the first time down was a wake-up call to how challenging this sport could be.

“When you’re going down you lose all the air. It’s hard to breathe," he said. "And then we hit the first turn and it was boom, boom, boom, and it was violence. It was intense.”

But Jackson said each time he practiced and trained, he felt himself getting better.  

“What the boys have done is more impressive than anything I could have done,” he said.

What they ended up doing was a first for Israel. Over the course of eight races, this team, constructed seemingly week by week, placed third overall at the circuit.

“This year probably outranks in terms of what I’m proud of, outranks the Olympic appearance in 2018,” said Edelman.

Now, he has some hardware at home. So does Jackson, who had never touched a bobsled until five months ago. But now he’s caught the bug.

“I’ve quickly fallen in love with the sport and hopefully we’ll see where the future takes us," he said, adding he will be training now for the sport.

Edelman has a goal of making the Olympics in 2026. What is certain, as Edelman promised himself last year, is the team will never give up.