“I don’t think I’ve ever been satisfied with my halfpipe runs, and I don’t think a lot of skiers are,” she said, after her Olympic halfpipe run drew attention.
Elizabeth Swaney, whose modest freestyle skiing runs in the halfpipe were briefly the talk of the Winter Olympics, did not want to go viral.
Swaney, 33, was born in the United States during the 1984 Summer Olympics and has wanted to compete in the Games since she was 7 years old.
On Sunday, competing for Hungary, where her grandparents are from, she came in 24th, last place, in the women’s ski halfpipe competition.
Her runs drew attention around the world for their very lack of attention-catching moments. In a competition stocked to the brim with eye-popping athletic feats, Swaney’s mild back-and-forth turns across the halfpipe stood out.
Dropping in cautiously on her first run, her skis slightly crooked, she resembled an eager young skier on a bunny slope, with cautious hops as well as several 180-degree jumps, or alley-oops.
Her tentative approach was a striking contrast to that of Cassie Sharpe, the eventual gold medalist in the event, who, on her second qualifying run, hit back-to-back 900s and three full rotations for a 1080 jump.
But Swaney, in an interview on Tuesday, said she was disappointed in her performance, and was certainly not looking to make people laugh.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been satisfied with my halfpipe runs, and I don’t think a lot of skiers are,” she said. “I haven’t been as confident as I wanted to be to go higher out of the pipe and just really go for these bigger tricks.”
She was frustrated to receive so much attention when she felt her competitors deserved the limelight.
“I look up to them,” she said, naming Sharpe, the eventual gold medal winner in the event, and the United States competitors Brita Sigourney and Annalisa Drew.
Each nation can send a maximum of four skiers to compete in the women’s halfpipe. So while other athletes qualified ahead of Swaney, she was able to ski for Hungary thanks to that quota system and a dearth of other athletes from countries that had not already sent four competitors to the event.
Philippe Belanger, the head judge of freeskiing competitions at the Pyeongchang Olympics, told The Denver Post that the International Ski Federation was considering proposals that would decrease the number of competitive slots available for Olympic competitors in the halfpipe, which would make it more difficult for athletes like Swaney to qualify.
But Swaney, who is based in the Bay Area, has been working toward her Olympic dream for most of her life. Inspired by Kristi Yamaguchi’s gold medal performance in the 1992 Olympic Games, Swaney skated from her childhood until her second year of college. (Her father signed her up for a 30-minute weekly lesson. She did not realize until years later that figure skaters trained six or seven days a week.)
For two years at the University of California, Berkeley, she was the coxswain — the person who directs the crew from the stern of the boat — for the nationally competitive men’s rowing team.
Her experience steering a crew team led her to believe that she might be able to steer a bobsled. The United States women’s bobsled team told her that she was too small to be a bobsledder, but that it was impressed by her athletic background. She eventually took up skeleton — a headfirst version of luge.
She began skiing in 2010, after attending the Vancouver Olympics and feeling inspired by the skiers, and doubled down on the event after giving up skeleton. For six years, training in Utah, she would often wake up at 6:30 in the morning to go the gym, then ski for hours. She fit training in around two part-time jobs.
Still, she did not know that she would be heading to South Korea until Jan. 24, when she learned she had qualified. She arrived in Budapest at midnight on the 25th, having brought only her passport, her jacket and the bag she had brought to work that day.
She said there was some attention she was grateful for: the supportive texts she received from her parents after the event.
“My dad told me he found my runs really graceful, so I was happy to hear that,” she said. “They’re not as familiar with skiing as they are with other sports, but they were happy to see me compete.”
