The (very bad) American skier who used a loophole to sneak into the Olympics
If you've ever been watching the Winter Games and thought, "I can do that!" then American freestyle skier Elizabeth Swaney is your spirit Olympian.
Swaney, an eclectic 33-year-old who ran against Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor as an undergrad at Berkeley and has a masters from Harvard, took advantage of loose Olympic regulations to land a spot in Pyeongchang simply by showing up.
She competed in the Olympics on Monday, tentatively skiing down the halfpipe and pivoting at the top with no tricks. Her scores ranked her dead last in the competition. The whole thing might be funny if there weren't dozens of other people around the world who'd been training their whole lives to do what Swaney just made a farce of.
With her Bay Area recruiting job and multiple degrees, Swaney decided to try her hand at halfpipe skiing, which is the same as snowboard halfpipe, just with skis. Swaney wasn't good or even competent. The best she could do was ski up the side of the pipe and come back down. (Granted, that's not an easy thing to do. It takes some skill to be able to navigate the halfpipe without falling over. But it also takes skill to parallel park on the driver's side and you don't see me clamoring to go to South Korea because of it.)
The goal: make the Olympics.
As Blevins explains, a skier qualifies for the Games after having a certain number of top 30 finishes in World Cup events. But because skiing halfpipe events don't often have 30 entrants, all Blevins often had to do was show up to get World Cup credit. If a competition had, say, 28 competitors, she'd enter, ski down the pipe the way ordinary people would navigate a slope designated by a green circle, manage to stay upright, receive little-to-no points from judges and wait for someone else to crash. Then she'd move up the standings and get some points to add to her overall total. Do that at enough events and suddenly you have enough World Cup bonafides to qualify for the Games - but only if you're from the right country.
Swaney couldn't compete for the U.S. - there are too many real competitiors. So she first began skiing under a Venezuelan flag before switching to Hungary, presumably because that nation was able to better assist with her ruse. (She says it's where her grandparents are from.) Ultimately, she landed a spot in Pyeongchang by little more than just showing up.
To Swaney's credit, she exploited these loopholes to perfection. Last year, Swaney had her best ever finish - a 13th place at a World Cup event in China. That's great, until you consider that all the top skiers were halfway across the world competing in the Dew Tour and only 15 women entered that Chinese event. Regardless, her gambit gave her 200 World Cup points. Do that enough and hope your not-native country is allowed to send competitors to the event because other nations didn't fill their quota and - voila! - you ttoo can be an Olympian.
more at link...
Connect With Us