Getting to the Olympics involves years of intensive training, dedication, and physical strength. For some, it also entails hours spent watching YouTube videos.
Adam Edelman, a 27-year-old from Boston, Massachusetts, will represent Israel’s team in skeleton sledding at 2018 Winter Olympics. He taught himself this dangerous sport by watching a bunch of YouTube videos.
Having grown up Jewish with a yeshiva (Orthodox Jewish) education, Edelman played hockey for most of his life, starting when he was three years old. He identifies as a Zionist and immigrated to Israel as an adult, where he joined the skeleton sledding team. He only learned that this team existed in 2013.
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“Four years ago, I thought about how I could help Israel in sports,” Edelman told Haaretz. “And then I saw this crazy sport on television with skeleton sleds. I thought that if this is such a crazy sport, Israelis can look at it and think, ‘Huh, can we do that too?’”
Edelman approached Israel’s Olympic Committee with the idea of getting to the Olympics in skeleton sledding, and the group supported him. Still, he had no outside funding, nor a trainer. Rather, he seeks funding through social media, like this YouTube video, and has watched lots of YouTube content to master his skeleton sledding technique.
If you search “how to skeleton sled” on YouTube, you’ll get about 42,000 results. They may very not all be relevant, but from a quick scroll you can find plenty of “Beginner’s Guide” and “Skeleton 101” type videos. There are also lots of videos depicting crashes. Since competitors travel at around 80 miles per hour, crashing on a skeleton sled is no joke. No wonder there’s a section in the Haaretz article titled, “A Jewish mother’s concerns.”
Edelman isn’t the first Olympian to learn his sport from YouTube. Javelin expert Julius Yego, of Kenya, also took to YouTube to gain the skills he needed to compete in the 2016 Rio Olympics, where he earned a silver medal. He was known at the time as “The YouTube Man.”
You can watch Edelman compete for Israel in PyeongChang, South Korea at the Winter Olympics in February.
