The Easy Way to Get into the Olympics

Today, the attention of the world is on the Summer Olympics in Paris. We tune in to watch the best of the best do things that most of us could barely dream of achieving. Sure, most of us can swim, but none of us can do so at the blazing-fast speeds needed to make it to the Games. And the same is true for the Winter Olympics; many of us can ski, but few of us can do so well enough to call ourselves Olympians. Whatever sport you love, you need to work countless hours, have elite innate talent, and get lucky when it counts.

And then there’s Elizabeth Swaney, the skier from California who got there the easy way.

Swaney’s Olympic resume is short: she competed in the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea in the halfpipe, a freestyle skiing competition. Competitors ski from side to side through a carved-out u-shaped basin, and when they reach the rim of the pipe, they do tricks and the like. The skiers get more points for more complex tricks — the height they get off the ground, their hangtime, and most importantly, for spinning around while airborne. Below is the Gold Medal-winning run from 2018 by Canadian skier Cassie Sharpe in 2018, and you’ll see what I mean: she flies through through the air multiple times and finishes with a 1080-degree spin.

Elizabeth Swaney, though, isn’t quite as good as Sharpe — to say the least. Here’s her best run from the 2018 Olympic Games.

That’s … not very good. Swaney just casually makes her way down the course, doing a total of no tricks. Sharpe’s run earned her 95.80 out of 100, good enough for the gold medal; Swaney’s was worth 31.40 points, putting her in dead last by a large margin.

Swaney wasn’t hurt. And she wasn’t being lazy. She was trying her best. She just isn’t an Olympic-caliber halfpipe skier.

So how’d she make it to the South Korean games? She found a loophole.

To qualify for the halfpipe competition, skiers need to compete and succeed in championship events sanctioned by the International Ski Federation. Success, though, is a low bar. First, you need at least one top-30 placement in at least one event, and second, you need enough top-30 finishes to amass at least 50 points across all the events you participate in. And in halfpipe, that happens to be very easy. First, there are a lot of events — if you can afford to globetrot with a pair of skis on your back, you can easily sign up for enough events to give you a fighting chance. Doing that got Swaney part of the way to the South Korea games; as the CBC reported, “Swaney achieved 13 [points-earning finishes] just by turning up and competing at events where there were less than 30 athletes competing.”

Second, you don’t need to be very good to earn a few points. Halfpipe skiers win competitions by pulling off complicated aerial stunts, and often, they fall while doing so. If you play it safe, and enough of your competitors wipe you, you’ll also earn points. So Swaney did just that. As Steele Spence, a halfpipe judge, told the Denver Post, “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. She would compete in them consistently over the last couple years and sometimes girls would crash so she would not end up dead last. “

Swaney, by simply making her way slowly and steadily down the pipe, earned enough points to be ranked 34th in the world. But that wasn’t quite enough to make her Olympic dreams come true. Only 24 skiers make it into the halfpipe competition.

But she wasn’t done yet.

The Olympic organizers don’t want competitions to be dominated by a small handful of countries. For newer events — like freestyle skiing — that’s often a risk, as there aren’t a lot of nations that have invested in the sport yet. In 2018, nations could only bring 30 total freestyle skiers to the Games across ten different events (five men, five women). Swaney wasn’t nearly good enough to make the U.S. team, but that was also the case for many of the other 33 people ranked above her. And unlike many of those who didn’t make the cut, Swaney had another way in: she could compete for Hungary. Even though she was born and raised in America, Swaney’s grandparents were from Hungary, and the Hungarian Olympic Committee accepted her request to join their team. And, as the Guardian reported, the rest was luck: “By the time the 2018 Olympics drew near, she was on the cusp of qualification. When a few athletes pulled out due to injury just weeks before the games, Swaney got the call from the Hungarian Olympic Committee that she’d always dreamed of. She was in.”

Swaney’s success— if you can call it that — wasn’t appreciated by many, who saw her effort as a mockery of the Games. But that sentiment was hardly unanimous. Cassie Sharpe, the skier above who walked away with the Gold, was fine with it, telling the CBC “If you are going to put in the time and effort to be here, then you deserve to be here as much as I do.”

Bonus fact: Swaney’s path to the Olympics, while achievable without much talent, was still pretty rigorous — she had to amass those top-30 finishes. That’s because in 1988, a British ski jumper named Michael David Edwards didn’t have to do anything of the sort. Edwards — or “Eddie the Eagle,” as he’s more commonly known in Olympic lore — basically just signed up to compete. England hadn’t competed in ski jumping since the 1928 Games, so Eddie — 5’8” and “wearing six pairs of socks inside hand-me-down ski boots” (in order to fit in them) per Smithsonian, made his way down the Olympic hill. He came in last place on the small hill, earning 69.2 points (compared to 140.4 by the second-to-last place finisher) and 57.5 points (versus 110.8 by second-to-last) on the 90-meter hill. Olympic organizers changed the qualification rules afterward to prevent future Eagles from flying, but for Great Britain, the result was good enough. Eddie’s 71-meter jump in the 1988 Games set a national record, one that he would retain for the rest of the 20th century.

From the Archives: Eric the Eel: Olympic swimming, loosely defined.