Don’t be upset about skier who doesn’t rate
I first was alerted to the outrage over Elizabeth Swaney by my son, who lives the snowboarding mountain life in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
“The ski community thinks she’s an embarrassment,” my kid said, adding a florid expletive before the last word.
And sure enough, what I had found mildly humorous has indeed made some people furious. The outrage is there in the blogosphere. The Oakland native is accused of cheating, of gaming the system, of being a pretentious Harvard grad stealing a spot from some worthy Olympian.
In case you haven’t heard — and most of the world has by now — Swaney, 33, represented Hungary at the Winter Olympics in freestyle skiing. Her halfpipe run went viral, not because it was worth watching but because it was ridicu-
lously simplistic, like something an 8-year-old might do at the snow park.
“Pizza and french fries,” my son described it, referring to the technique beginning coaches teach little ones on the bunny slope.
Listening to the commentator describing her run — “up and down, up ... and down” — and even having replays of the most boring run in Olympic history seemed like some ridiculous GEICO commercial come to life. The crowd shots showed utter confusion on the face of spectators.
The video went viral. The criticism was global.
But, from my point of view, Swaney doesn’t deserve outrage. Yes, the Olympics are meant to showcase elite athletes, but they are also a platform for people who take chances. And Swaney takes chances. Maybe not with aerial tricks, but with how she lives her life.
She’s the type of person about whom literature is written, someone living a unique life. A Forrest Gump for her time. An Andy Kaufman meets Zelig kind of character. A person George Plimpton probably would be proud to know.
Swaney’s famously bad ski run is just one line on a bizarre resume. The Oakland native ran for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger when she was 19. She was the coxswain for the men’s crew team at Cal. She graduated from Cal as a triple major in Political Economy, German and Political Science. She has a master’s degree from Harvard in design. She works for Bay Area-based Thumbtack as a technical recruiter.
She tried out to be a dancer for the Utah Jazz. She tried out to be a Raiderette. She tried out for a reality cooking show. She explored being a bobsledder. She took up skeleton. In 2010, she started skiing and, first using her mother’s Venezuelan heritage and then her grandparents’ Hungarian roots, started attending World Cup events.
She clearly had money to burn to be able to fly around the country — though she did try crowdsourcing. She was an amateur skiing with professionals, pursuing a dream that had been launched when she saw fellow East Bay native Kristi Yamaguchi win gold in 1992.
Swaney found events in which she would get a top-30 finish, because she was skiing in events with no more than 30 competitors. She went to World Cup events when the top skiers were absent, competing on the Dew Tour. She often stayed upright while others crashed, so occasionally she did not finish last. She was helped by a country quota system that gave Hungary a berth.
Her place in the Olympics, and the mockery she seems to have made of the process, might lead the International Ski Federation to revamp its rules and standards. The Olympic powers seem embarrassed and irritated that such a lame performance overshadowed the highly trained competitive athletes.
But Swaney is part of a long history of average people trying to achieve an Olympic dream. Eddie the Eagle, the British ski jumper, was a sensation in 1988; his participation led to a revamping of the rules. Phillip Boit was Kenya’s first Winter Olympian but his berth was the result of a Nike publicity stunt. Everyone’s favorite shirtless flag bearer, Tonga’s Pita Taufatofua, decided to become a cross-country skier just a year ago, after having so much fun competing in Taekwondo in Rio in 2016.
All, like Swaney, finished last, or almost last.
The charges of gaming the system? Of cheating? Those are pretty extreme accusations in the wake of Russia cheating its way to the top of the medal count in Sochi in 2014 through systematic government-sponsored doping. Yet Russian athletes are still able to compete in Pyeongchang under the name Olympic Athletes from Russia.
The Olympic tradition is full of real cheating throughout history. Of gaming the system: Elites and royalty often have maneuvered their way onto Olympic teams. Many have stolen berths and medals from legitimate athletes, in far more hurtful and damaging ways than Swaney did.
What Swaney did wasn’t cheating. It was enterprising. Interesting. Strange. And one more line in a compelling resume.
One more chapter in what is sure to be a very interesting book.