Few Olympic athletes are jubilant at coming in last place. But for Israel’s bobsleigh team, the Olympic dream was never about a medal — but about showing up, hitting the ice and waving the flag.

And their Olympic run isn’t over yet.

Israel’s two-man bobsleigh team, made up of pilot AJ Edelman and brakeman Menachem Chen, finished its third and final heat Tuesday evening in 26th and last place, with only the top 20 sleds competing in the fourth heat.

And they were overjoyed.

“What we accomplished today, some kid is going to see in 10, 15, 20 years, and he’s going to be inspired by that to do his own journey,” Edelman told Israel’s Sport5 channel in an interview shortly after finishing the race Tuesday night.

“We’re very proud, we’re moving forward to the four-man event,” the team’s pilot added. “Israel is in the Olympics, baby! We did something unbelievable in this sport, to do it by ourselves, piecing it together. People might not realize how amazing this accomplishment is for this country.”

The team was never seen as having any real shot at a medal, after just missing out on qualifying outright for the Games, and winning an Olympic spot thanks to reallocation.

But for the Israeli team, and Edelman in particular, the Cinderella run at making it to the Olympics at all was the culmination of eight years of hard work, crushing disappointments and refusing to ever give up.

Edelman — a Boston native who made history as Israel’s first-ever Olympic skeleton athlete at the 2018 Games — cobbled together Israel’s bobsleigh team by recruiting Israeli athletes from other sports.

He brought in Chen from the world of discus throwing, while Omer Katz was a sprinter, Uri Zisman a pole vaulter and Ward Fawarseh — Israel’s first-ever Druze Olympian — a rugby player. Underfunded, overlooked and missing key training days due to IDF reserve duty for a number of its members, the team’s uphill battle has led it to celebrate every step along the journey.

“We always want to be the first but not the last,” Edelman told the Associated Press in an interview on Monday. “I was very sure that, if we didn’t get it done, there would never be an Israeli bobsleigh team in the Games, because no one was going to fight for that. Now we’ve set a precedent. Others can come after us.”

The team was also forced to skip a few pre-Olympic training days due to security concerns, leaving them the least experienced with the course in Cortina.

But Chen said the team has a real shot at improving its position in the four-man event, for which it has trained the hardest.

“Today we had some difficulties, but every day we shave off almost a second from the previous day’s time,” he told Sport5. “I’m positive that in the four-man we’ll have much better results.”

Of course, not everyone wants to see Israeli athletes — in particular ones as outspoken as Edelman — at the Olympics, something made clear by the firestorm Tuesday over comments made a day earlier by a Swiss broadcaster suggesting he be barred by his “support of the genocide in Gaza.”

Edelman brushed off the comments in the interview Tuesday night, calling it “such a sad thing to do,” and saying that soon enough, “no one is going to remember that.”

“One of the most amazing things about representing Israel is, you know in your heart that it’s the greatest country in the entire world,” he said. “Representing a country for 12 years — I get out of bed to do this, because it’s such an amazing place to represent… I live a very blessed life. I get to compete with the flag on my chest.”

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