Freestyle skier’s complex path offers Olympic Rorschach test
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea (AP) — The words left Liz Swaney’s lips without an ounce of irony. No telling curl of the lips. No wink. Nothing. She meant them. All of them.
“I didn’t qualify for finals so I’m really disappointed,” the 33-year-old Californian said after coming in last in the 24-woman field during Olympic women’s halfpipe qualifying on Monday. She seemed ... surprised. Even though her score of 31.40 was more than 40 points behind France’s Anais Caradeux, whose 72.80 marked the lowest of the 12 skiers to move on to Tuesday’s medal round.
Even though Swaney finished in about the same position in each of the dozen events she competed across the globe over the last four years in the run-up to the Pyeongchang Games.
Even though her two qualifying runs at Phoenix Snow Park featured little more than Swaney riding up the halfpipe wall before turning around in the air and skiing to the other side. It was a sequence she repeated a handful of times before capping her final trip with a pair of “alley oops”, basically inward 180 degree turns more fitting for the local slopes than the world’s largest sporting event.
Halfpipe is judged on a 100-point scale. Swaney has yet to break 40 in an FIS-sanctioned competition, not because she regularly wipes out trying to throw difficult tricks but because she doesn’t even try them.
Yet she’s here in South Korea anyway as part of the Hungarian delegation, the latest in a series of quixotic pursuits that include running for governor of California as a 19-year-old student at Berkeley to trying out for the Oakland Raiders cheerleading team to mounting a push to reach the Olympics as skeleton racer for Venezuela. She only started skiing eight years ago and only got serious about it after the skeleton thing didn’t take.
“I still want to inspire people to get involved with athletics or a new sport or a new challenge at any age in life,” she said.
A tale that’s hardly new, though Swaney’s unusual path offers a Rorschach test of sorts on what the Olympics actually mean.
The games have long trafficked in the soft-focus narrative of plucky dreamers with no shot. Think Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, the bespectacled British ski jumper; the Jamaican bobsled team or relentlessly shirtless Tongan Olympian Pita Taufatofua , who came in 114th PUBLIC NOTICE out of 116 skiers in the 15-kilometer cross-country race last week.
Korea entered 19-yearold Kyoungeun Kim in women’s aerials earlier in the Games, the first skier from the host country to take on the event at the Olympics. Kim came in dead last while going off the smallest of the five “kicker” ramps used at the Games, the back flip she completed in the second round akin to something a teenager might do off a diving board at the neighborhood pool.
Taufatofua and Edwards embraced the uniqueness of their stories, fully allowing they were simply happy to be at the Olympics and nothing more. Kim represented Korea’s first foray into the sport. All three of them competed for the countries they were born in.
Swaney’s story is more complicated.
Let’s get this out of the way early: she did nothing illegal to get here. She racked up the required FIS points to reach the Olympic standard.