US-Born Skier Elizabeth Swaney Games System to Compete in 2018 Olympics

Elizabeth Swaney defied the odds to participate in the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

Born and raised in the United States, the skier earned an Olympics spot by representing Hungary. Per Reuters' Jack Tarrant, the 33-year-old "qualified to represent Hungary through her maternal grandparents after previously competing for Venezuela in other winter sports."

According to her official Olympic profile page, Swaney finished higher than 28th in only one of her five World Cup competitions this season. So how did she earn a spot in the freestyle halfpipe qualifying event?

As International Ski Federation judge Steele Spence told Jason Blevins of the Denver Post (via Sporting News' Marcus DiNitto), Swaney exploited a loophole by accumulating appearances and often simply avoiding a last-place finish for a country with few Olympic hopefuls in the sport.

"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," Spence said. "She would compete in them consistently over the last couple years, and sometimes girls would crash, so she would not end up dead last."

Playing with house money, Swaney finished 24th out of 24 entrants with a score of 31.40—the second-to-last finisher scored 45.00—after two conservative runs. It did not appear like she had any intentions of trying to qualify for the final, but she nevertheless expressed some dissatisfaction, per Tarrant.

"I didn't qualify for the finals, so I'm really disappointed with that," Swaney said. "But I worked really for several years to achieve this."

Swaney, a Harvard graduate who ran against Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California, according to Tarrant, did not come close to winning in Pyeongchang. Yet she can forever refer to herself as an Olympic athlete.