'If you can dream it, you can achieve it'

Israeli skier’s journey to Winter Olympic slopes was an up- and downhill battle

Attila Mihaly Kertesz, a Hungarian native who took up cross-country skiing in 2018, says representing Israel on sport’s biggest global stage is ‘something I can give back to my nation’

Attila Mihaly Kertesz is an unlikely Olympian. But he’s an even more unlikely Israeli Olympian.

Come February, Kertesz – a 37-year-old veterinarian who was born and raised in Hungary and now lives in Thailand – will take to the cross-country ski slopes with the Israeli emblem on his arm at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.

And he only began training in the sport in 2018.

“In the beginning, I told a very few people because I thought… people [would be] skeptical,” Kertesz told The Times of Israel in a recent phone interview.

He said he expected to hear, “‘Oh, this is not realistic. You are too old. Try something else.’ And I didn’t want to hear these negative voices. So I told very few people about my goal.”

But on December 7, Kertesz accomplished what many thought impossible, hitting the qualification criteria at the FIS Cross-Country World Cup in Trondheim, Norway, and clinching a spot in the Olympic Games.

He will be one of just a handful of athletes expected to represent Israel in Milano Cortina next year. Israel, which made its Winter Olympics debut in 1994, has never won a medal at the cold-weather games. The country – known more for its sunny Mediterranean climate than snow or ice – sent just six athletes to the 2022 Games in Beijing, and has never sent more than 10.

For Kertesz, making history is one of the things that pulled him toward the Olympics and to competing for Israel as its first-ever Olympic cross-country skier.

“It’s historic to be the first [Israeli] cross-country skier,” he said. “I thought, OK, this is something I can give back to my nation.”

Long path to citizenship

Kertesz’s journey to becoming an Israeli citizen has been almost as arduous as his path to the Olympics. In 2015, he said, he and his family decided that they wanted to move from Hungary to Israel, where they were eligible for citizenship due to his wife’s Jewish heritage.

After working toward that goal, they finally moved to Tel Aviv in February 2020, “and we were waiting for the last step of the aliya – and then COVID hit and the bureaucracy froze, and we didn’t have the legal documents to stay in Israel, so we had to move back to Hungary. We didn’t want to, but we had to.”

In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the family felt a need to flee Hungary and ended up settling in Thailand since their documentation for Israel was not yet finalized. The next year, they restarted the immigration process, “gathered all the documents again, and we got all the green lights, and we even had our flight scheduled,” said Kertesz.

That flight was scheduled for October 10, 2023 – and was canceled in the wake of the Hamas massacre three days earlier.

Finally, said Kertesz, in the summer of 2024, “we were able to fly to Israel, get the citizenship, and get all the paperwork done.”

For now, he said, they remain in Thailand, where his two kids “are in a really good school.” But “definitely, we want to move [to Israel] as soon as we are able to do that.”

Olympic pipe dream

Parallel to that bumpy journey toward obtaining Israeli citizenship, Kertesz was also pursuing his Olympic pipe dream, in a sport he had only picked up in 2018. As a teenager, he said, he competed in kayaking on a high level, which he halted when he entered veterinary school.

“In 2018, it was maybe the second time I was on cross-country skis, and I immediately fell in love,” said Kertesz. “It’s a full-body sport… You have to push with your arms, with your shoulders, and also you have to have a very strong core.”

Israel has no national skiing federation, and the Olympic Committee of Israel was understandably skeptical about Kertesz’s chances, he said.

“At the beginning, I think they didn’t even think that it’s realistic that I would go to the Olympics,” he said. But “they are very supportive at this point.”

Kertesz is hopeful that his Olympic debut can inspire young — and not so young — Israelis to think about winter sports in general and cross-country skiing specifically.

“I was 30 years old when I decided to do it on a competitive level,” he pointed out. “So it’s never too late if you have the motivation.”

His efforts have been totally self-funded. “If I had known in the beginning how much it would cost, maybe I wouldn’t have even started,” he admits, saying he has so far spent around $140,000 on his efforts. Professional cross-country skiers, he pointed out, “end up with 40, 50 or even 60 pairs of skis” for different types of snow conditions.

“I only have one pair of professional or racing-level skating skis,” said Kertesz, and at each event, he holds out hope that “on racing day, you get the kind of snow which is good for my skis.”

After qualifying, everything else is gravy

As soon as he had his Israeli citizenship in hand, Kertesz said he hit the ground – or rather the ski slopes – running, competing in enough races to qualify for the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in February 2025.

There, “I missed the Olympic quota by only three seconds on a 30-minute course,” he recounted. “And I was so devastated, I was so sad, depressed – but I thought, OK, at this point, I just cannot give up.”

There were several more opportunities to make the Olympic quota, including a November race in Finland, where “I missed the quota again by 16 seconds,” he said.

Coming into the next opportunity in Norway in early December, Kertesz admitted that “I thought, OK, I have no chance here,” in particular because the race was the skating style, rather than the classic style in which he mostly trained.

“So I was like, OK, I have no realistic chance here, just be calm, don’t blow it, pace yourself very calmly – and it was enough. And I was surprised,” he said.

The moment when he got the news that he had hit the qualification criteria, “I couldn’t believe I was in, I was crying.”

Now, with just two months until he makes his Olympic debut, Kertesz is setting realistic goals for his time on the slopes.

“Everybody is preparing very hard, because nobody wants to be the last in the Olympic Games – but somebody has to,” he said, noting that he believes he can be competitive among other countries without strong winter sports athletes, including South Africa, Macedonia, Morocco and Venezuela.

No matter the ultimate result, he said, “we already achieved our dream to start at the Olympic Games.”

Kertesz said that throughout his many years pursuing his dreams, “there were very, very hard parts of this journey… my message would be that if you can dream it, you can achieve it.”