For those of us who've strapped on skis and caught three inches of air, or maybe even tapped a rail in a terrain park, Elizabeth Swaney is a sign that we, too, can make it to the Olympics.
U.S.-born Swaney, 33, who is competing on Hungary's team, took to the halfpipe yesterday and "sent it," as Red Gerard would say. A casual viewer like myself would've thought a five-beers-deep fan snuck past security and took a run. But no, it was Swaney—an Olympic athlete who qualified for these Games—with a graceful, tentative, leisurely, and thoroughly average run.
Sadly, Swaney, a University of California-Berkeley graduate with a master's degree in design studies from Harvard, did not qualify for the finals. But the conversation didn't stop when her run ended with her skiing backwards like a champ! The people needed to know how their hero snuck into Pyeongchang.
Swaney, whose grandparents are Hungarian, started freestyle skiing in 2013 with the sole goal of making it to Pyeongchang. She had no shot of making the American team so she switched allegiances, but she still had to make it through the competitive portion of qualification.
She needed to finish within the top 30 at World Cup circuit events. And she did. For example, she went to a small event in China while the majority of her peers competed at major events in Colorado and Utah, and she finished 13th out 15 without throwing a single trick. She just didn't fall.
Then came her real moment of reckoning (and luck). There are only 24 spots at the Olympics for women's halfpipe and each nation can send its top four skiers to the games. After globetrotting to smaller events, Swaney, brace yourself, was ranked No. 34 in the world. So she qualified thanks to limits on how many skiers from a single country can compete and because a few athletes pulled out due to injury. And Hungary's ski federation has some old and flimsy reallocation rules.
The Denver Post reported that the freestyle world is not exactly thrilled with Swaney's high-flying run. They even got a slopestyle judge to explain exactly how Swaney gamed the system.
“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,” said longtime FIS ski halfpipe and slopestyle judge Steele Spence. “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.”
The rules will probably change before the next Winter Olympics. But for now, Swaney told Reuters that she hopes her legendary Olympic run will inspire others.
