Elizabeth Swaney

Elizabeth Marian Swaney (born 30 July 1984) is an American athlete who competed for Hungary in the 2018 Winter Olympics in the women's halfpipe. She placed last in her sole event at the Olympics, drawing media attention and controversy both for the procedure that she used to qualify for the Games and for the apparent lack of effort in her runs. Swaney grew up in a bilingual Spanish–English household in the Oakland Rockridge neighborhood, and attended high school in Lafayette.

In high school, she rowed for the Oakland Strokes. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. While a student, she briefly launched a campaign for Governor of California. While at Harvard, she volunteered as the assistant coach for their Track and Field team.

Athletic career While at the University of California, Berkeley, Swaney was a coxswain and the only woman on the championship Division I Men's Crew/Rowing team and a Pac-10 Second Team All-American. Having had Olympic ambitions since childhood, she sought to compete in bobsleigh as a pilot for the United States, but was told she was too small to be competitive in the sport. and freestyle skiing, in which she sought to represent Venezuela, her mother's homeland, at the 2014 Winter Olympics. She started skiing for Hungary in 2015, based on her grandparents' country of birth.

Olympic qualifying Swaney qualified for the 2018 Winter Olympics representing Hungary in half-pipe skiing. Beginning in 2013 Swaney achieved this by attending competitions with fewer than thirty participants,

As a result of Swaney's selection of competitions, she was ranked 34th in her run up to the Olympics.

As a result, only four of the six women ranked within the top 20 in the world in halfpipe skiing were allowed to represent the United States in the Olympics based on the quota system. Between the quota system and injuries, Swaney's ranking of 34 granted her qualification for the Olympics.

Swaney's performance was considered polarizing, with CBS Sports writing that she scammed her way into the Olympics and calling her "mind-numbingly average." However, Swaney received support from a number of Olympians, including gold medalist Maddie Bowman, double gold medalist David Wise,

2028 Summer Olympics Swaney initially thought about competing in weightlifting at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. She told the San Francisco Chronicle that she became interested in the sport while training in skeleton, and focused on it during the COVID-19 lockdown. . In 2022, she was the finance director for Spinsters of San Francisco.