Watch the Olympic halfpipe skier who can't do any tricks, but made it anyway
Ever dream of being in the Olympics? It’s possible, even if you’re not that good at your sport, as Elizabeth Swaney proved Sunday.
Swaney, an American competing for Hungary in the women’s freestyle halfpipe skiing competition, finished dead last after laying down two very average runs. No jumps, no tricks, and an extremely low degree of difficulty, relative to the rest of the field.
How did someone of such average skiing ability make the Olympics?
First, she competed for a country that has very little presence in her sport – Hungary. She was the only competitor in freestyle skiing from that country.
How does an American get to compete for Hungary? She qualified for Team Hungary because her grandparents are Hungarian.
And how did she qualify to compete against the best in the world in the Olympics?
“The field is not that deep in the women’s pipe and she went to every World Cup, where there were only 24, 25, or 28 women,” International Ski Federation halfpipe skiing judge Steele Spence told the Denver Post.
“She would compete in them consistently over the last couple years and sometimes girls would crash so she would not end up dead last. There are going to be changes to World Cup quotas and qualifying to be eligible for the Olympics. Those things are in the works so technically you need to qualify up through the system,” Steele added.
Since a top-30 finish qualifies you for the Olympics, she pretty much always finished in the top 30 at word cup events because there were rarely that many competitors.
And because she was careful not to fall, Swaney rarely crashed. Thus, she usually finished the run and obtained the points. At one world cup event in China, only 15 skiiers competed and she finished 13th because two competitors wiped out.
American Elizabeth Swaney games the Olympics, figures out a way to get on Team Hungary's freestyle ski team, can barely ski, completes her first run in dramatic fashion https://t.co/ewcVJS64eW pic.twitter.com/BweOk2VSEI
— Busted Coverage (@bustedcoverage) February 19, 2018
Monday at the Olympics, she finished 24th out of 24th, with scores of 30.0, 31.40, and 31.40 on her three runs.
To put those scores in perspective, the top qualifier, Canada’s Cassie Sharpe, had a high score of 93.40. The lowest score among the 12 skiiers who qualified for the finals was 72.80, turned in by France’s Anais Caradeux. So, Swaney was more than 40 points away from just qualifying for the finals. And she was 13.40 points shy of the 23rd place finisher, who slipped twice.
“I didn’t qualify for the finals, so I’m really disappointed with that. But I worked really hard for several years to achieve this,” Swaney said after the race. “I have been focusing on my Olympic experience but also on the halfpipe here and trying to go higher each time and getting more spins in.”
Believe it or not, it’s not the first sport Swaney has competed in with the hope of making the Olympics. She’s also tried to compete for Venezuela, where her mother is from, in the skeleton, and even started a GoFundMe page to get Venezuela in the 2014 Winter Olympics for skeleton, which is sort of like a head-first version of luge.
Inspiration or gaming the system? Elizabeth Swaney, an American skiing for #TeamHungary, delivers average-skier perspective (no tricks) to #PyeongChang2018 #Olympic #halfpipe contest https://t.co/NjP3zmCOAM
— Jason ☀️ Blevins (@jasonblevins) February 18, 2018
When she’s not training to compete for Hungary of Venezuela, Swaney, 33, is a recruiter for software engineers in Silicon Valley.
Swaney got her undergraduate degree at the University of California-Berkeley and ran for governor of California against Arnold Schwarzenegger at age 19. She then went on to get a graduate degree at Harvard University.
Despite her lackluster performance in the halfpipe, she hopes to inspire others to follow their Olympic dreams.
“I want to inspire others in Hungary and the world to become involved in freestyle skiing,” Swaney told the Denver Post. “Maybe perhaps I’m the bridge to those who want to get started in the life of freestyle skiing and I want to show people that, yeah, it’s possible to get involved in freestyle skiing through a variety of backgrounds.”
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