Our Hero

Go big, Lizzie, go big!

ONE of the principles that we abide by here at In Play Lose is that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. And few people have taken that principle to loftier heights than Californian-turned-Venezuelan-turned Hungarian skeleton-rider-turned-freestyle skier Elizabeth Swaney, who put forth one of the lamest attempts in Olympic history when she went for a casual Sunday ski in the countryside down the halfpipe in PyeongChang. Swaney finished dead last, 24th of the 24 competitors entered, and then afterwards expressed her disappointment that she didn’t make the final (those who interviewed her weren’t sure whether or not she was being sincere), and then uttered some generic boilerplate text about how she aspired to be an inspiration to the Hungarian people – which, I suppose, could be true, in that the Hungarian people could see that it’s possible to do something really, really badly and yet somehow get attention for it.

Swaney was the latest in a long-line of Winter Olympic tourists, the most dubious of which are chronicled in this excellent piece published by The Ringer. The IOC is generally okay with obscure nations fielding sup-optimal athletes for events, and with good reason: the goal is to spread the gospel of the Olympic Games, and encourage participation across the globe. These athletes from weird, obscure nations may seem ridiculous, but over time, it’s possible to find true talent anywhere, and then eventually, you just might wind up finding someone from Surinam or Liechtenstein on the podium. (And it is an unstated goal of In Play Lose to somehow eventually mention every nation on earth within these posts. There, I’ve just named four more in two paragraphs. I can assure you this sort of behavior is nothing odd among journos. Someone at one of the weeklies I worked at ran a story with a Vaduz, Liechtenstein, dateline and I said to him, “you just ran this because you could get a Liechtenstein dateline in the issue” and he said, “well … yeah …”) 

I happen to agree with the idea, in principle, of attempting to expand the playing field, and I can understand completely that this will inevitably create some disparity in aptitude among those who are competing. That disparity becomes a bit more obvious in the Winter Olympics than in the summer, of course, for the simple reason that there are a lot of nations on this earth that don’t have any snow or ice. The Winter Olympics sports are almost all extremely technical in nature. Anyone can go out for a run. Not everyone can go out for a ski. 

And sometimes, the best way to encourage participation is for nations to go out and find willing participants, wherever they may be, which means finding some college kid from Seattle with Peruvian roots and suddenly declaring him to be a Peruvian. In order to field a team for the Winter Olympics, when you don’t have much snow or ice, the best way to go about doing that is to find someone from a place where there is snow or ice and give them a passport. The days of the iron-clad eligibility rules have long since passed in the Olympics – rules which were in place, mainly, because authoritarian nations wielded enormous power in the IOC and attempted to disincentivize their athletes defecting to the West in as many ways as possible. But nowadays, you can pretty much just hand someone a passport and say, “congratulations, you’re a Bulgarian” or what have you, and make up whatever justification you want. As time has passed, many of those shamateuristic Olympics ideals have faded, one of which being that somehow you need to continue to be tied to whatever nation you hailed from – a notion, which, historically, doesn’t hold any water as all, as the athletes from the original Greek games were perfectly happy to sell their services to whichever city-state ponied up the most. 

Nowadays, nations will just out-and-out buy a team, if need be. I’m actually surprised that it doesn’t happen more, in fact, given the inherent disproportion in talent you’re going to find from sport to sport. If one dominant power’s 10th best athlete in a sport – really good at what they do, but not quite good enough –  is better than anything you can put out there, let them come and be on your team, cultural connections be damned. You could field a good enough team of next-level Americans to finish 2nd to the Dream Team in the Olympics, for instance. Were the rules to permit it, I imagine Qatar would go about filling out a soccer team for 2022 World Cup by flying to Brazil and handing out fistsful of dollars along with passports. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done that. I went on a trip to L.A. with The Official Spouse of In Play Lose a few years ago, and we found ourselves housed in a hotel which was also playing host to a World Cup rhythmic gymnastics meet, of all things, and seemingly everyone involved seemed to be a Russian, no matter what the name of the country on the back of their tracksuits. The eligibility rules vary by sport, of course, with some more strident than others, but if the rules say you can buy a team, then go out and buy one!

But Elizabeth Swaney, our Hungarian freestyle skier here, didn’t need to be bought and, indeed, never could be because she doesn’t actually know how to do the event. One of the oddities about this case is the fact that the officials at the Hungarian Skiing Federation have admitted that they never actually saw her ski before, which speaks to a curious lack of oversight. Many of these Olympic tourists are one-off novelty acts who serve as something of a side show and comic relief: there is some African cross-country skier who looks as if they’ve never seen snow, or some Caribbean luger or whatnot, and they provide a certain amount of levity to what is a tense and stressful competition, what with them being long on heart and short on any discernible talent. But what sets Elizabeth Swaney apart from the others is her sheer persistence, having swapped passports more than once and tried multiple sports in her single-minded quest to make it to the Winter Olympics, all the while displaying incredible dedication as well as her ability to employ one of the most American of virtues, that of finding the loophole and figuring out how to game the system.

This particular ruse is multifaceted, which I definitely applaud. Almost every sport in the Olympics has, to some extent, some sort of minimum qualifying standard that you have to meet. The IOC has periodically been willing to relax or ignore competitive standards in the interest of encouraging participation – which is noble, I suppose, right up until you see someone like Eric the Eel attempting to swim, at which point you worry that he might, in fact, drown. (And god bless you, Eric, for giving it a go.) High-level competition can, in fact, be extremely dangerous, particularly in the winter events, and the sight of Eddie the Eagle flinging himself off the ski jumping hills of Calgary long ago gave everyone at the IOC offices in Lausanne a case of the heebie jeebies. So there are some standards here to uphold, although they aren’t as air tight as you might think. In order to qualify for the Winter Olympics in freestyle skiing, you need to earn enough points, which you do through achieving Top 30 finishes in World Cup events. 

Which gets us back to the reason the IOC is trying to increase participation, which is that there aren’t enough competitors in a lot of these sports in a national team-based construct, which restricts the number of team members. You could find 30 Americans, Canadians, and French to fill out the field at freestyle skiing events were these open competitions, but at a good number of events, there simply weren’t enough competitors – meaning that Elizabeth Swaney, our Hungarian hero, was earning points simply for showing up. And like I say, this isn’t just a freestyle skiing issue. For example, when women’s hockey was introduced to the Olympics in 1998, there were basically two good teams, the U.S. and Canada, and 20 years later, there are still basically two good teams. There aren’t enough biathletes, there aren’t enough lugers, nor enough bobsledders in all of the right places.

So Swaney spent several years traveling to competitions across the globe – all of which lacked sufficient numbers of competitors, which enabled her to amass points simply for showing up. She was also able to take advantage of one of the peculiarities of freestyle skiing, in that it’s a judged event in which what constitutes a performance is left entirely up to the interpretation of the judges. Judged sports are, of course, also historically some of the most corrupt, easy to rig through the greasing of palms or the swapping of favors. These sorts of sports have attempted to quantify how they are judged or scored over time, and these systems have their pluses and minuses. Some, like gymnastics and figure skating, have emphasized the importance of risk-taking so much as to create a series of perverse incentives where doing something difficult and doing it badly is better than not doing something difficult at all. (And, naturally, the Russian skater who won gold in PyeongChang did so by gaming the system.) Others take the tact of “whatever you do, do it well.” Freestyle skiing falls into that category. If you fall down, you get severely dinged no matter what it is that you’re trying.

And, as you can see from the .gif that fronts this entry, Swaney took the tack of not doing anything at all, which would actually benefit her in the standings at many events. She couldn’t be graded down for missing a jump, because she didn’t even try one, and doing the bare minimum occasionally resulted in finishing higher than competitors who tried stuff and failed. Taking this tack, of course, makes something of a mockery of the event. Freestyle skiing in a halfpipe is truly one of the most insane sports that I have ever seen. The flips and tricks these athletes pull off as they go flying into the air off the 24’ walls are stunning and absolutely terrifying. The jumps are amazing, the crashes are horrifying. And see, those flips and spins and tricks on skis are the whole bloody point of the event! As much as Eddie the Eagle has been mocked and lampooned in Olympic folklore, the guy was still willing to strap some enormous skis onto his feet and fling himself off the side of the mountain. Almost every sport in the Winter Olympics save for curling seems like it’s designed to kill you.

And you’d think that, in the years’ time she’s been doing this that maybe, maybe, she would, you know, learn how to do the event – but that clearly wasn’t the point. She already has shown enough self-preservation instincts to give up skeleton, properly concluding that hurling oneself head first down a narrow corridor of ice at 80 mph wasn’t a good idea. Swaney has said in interviews that she can, in fact, do some tricks in training, but just hasn’t incorporated them into her halfpipe routine, which is sort of like saying that you should be able to play for the Warriors because you can dunk on the 9’ rim at the middle school around the corner. (Her instructor in Park City was, well, diplomatic when asked about her technical abilities.) Instead, her 1-speed Land Cruiser of a run amid a field of Ferraris stood out like some bizarre alt-theatre piece. What the hell is this? What am I watching?

So to summarize, she spent several years travelling around the world, backed by a federation who’d never seen her ski, getting points for showing up and occasionally getting even more points for doing literally the bare minimum required to garner a score, doing nothing repeatedly in the halfpipes all around the globe in the hopes of eventually doing nothing in the halfpipe in Korea, which is exactly what she wound up doing. 

This is awesome. This is bloody brilliant. Elizabeth Swaney rules. 

Some would argue this makes a mockery of the Winter Olympics, to which I would reply that there isn’t an event on earth more worth mocking. Over the past 24 years, the Winter Olympics has been veering and skidding and hurtling uncontrollably through artificial and unsustainable growth, having been transformed from this fun February diversion taking place in sleepy alpine hamlets into this colossal event costing untold billions to put on. That this has occurred at all owes entirely to one singular event in 1994, which involved the entourage of one American figure skater conspiring, and then attempting, to bludgeon and break the leg of another. That scandal led to must-see viewing and huge ratings, because we all love crime capers and we all love to chase ambulances. Those enormous and record-breaking TV ratings, in turn, led to huge broadcasting rights fees paid by NBC (who, like usual, have completely misread all of the ratings data over that time and concluded that the main reason the ratings are so good is that we Americans actually care about figure skating), which is the basis for everything that the IOC does. Throw in a little bit of bribery here and there, sprinkle in some petrostate billions, season it all with grotesque senses of largesse and self-importance, and this fun, little February diversion has, over decades, grown to ultimately become so expensive, and so unwieldy, that no sane nation on earth wants to host it any more. I said previously that I felt like these Olympics were going to be something of a dud, a low-watt endeavour lacking starpower which was struggling to find ways to remain relevant. One thing that I noticed across Olympic disciplines this year was this attempt to invent new variations in order to generate interest – team events, new sorts of relays and the like, many of which the best athletes found pointless and skipped altogether. All of it felt forced and artificial. The event never really took off for me this year. It sort of slogged on and petered out for me. It was little more than a good way to kill some time during the weeklong NBA All-Star break, instead of doing much to stand out on its own.

And I say that as someone who has always loved the Olympics, because I love seeing people do incredible things on the grandest of stages. Seeing Elizabeth Swaney go meandering down the halfpipe does, in fact, destroy any sort of ideal that I have about the athletes. I mean, back when I had two functioning feet and I lived in Colorado, I would ski every day. I got to be a very competent skier, a skier who would probably have been better able to execute a freestyle ski routine than Swaney – and that’s not tooting my own horn, either, because no one of my level of skiing ever has any business ever being in the Olympics ever! 

But at the same time, this is one helluva hustle she pulled off. We like the Olympics, of course, precisely because cool athletes do cool things, and she wanted to be a part of that one way or another. And something more that I would say about our beloved Eddie the Eagle is that, when you think about it, save for Katarina Witt and possibly the dueling Brians, Eddie the Eagle is the single-most memorable character from the Calgary Olympics of 1988. Quick, who won the Men’s Alpine Combined in Calgary? Who won the biathlon relay? How many medals did the U.S. win? And no looking it up! You put that internet down right now! … oh wait, that means I don’t have any readers … 

The point is that these narratives fade and are soon forgotten. Part of why you see so many older athletes in the Winter Olympics is that they cling to this moment. It’s why you see 46-year-old speed skaters and 45-year-old ski jumpers. This 2-week period is their one chance to make even the slightest of marks and they yearn for that opportunity. American skier Mikaela Shiffrin, who won two medals in Korea yet somehow wound up being construed as a failure given what was expected of her, spoke of the intense sort of emptiness that these athletes feel once the Olympics are over. Many of them suffer through bouts of severe depression, wondering just what the hell it is that they are doing with their lives and questioning why it is that they keep breaking their bodies as they toil in obscurity. I’ll applaud anyone who finds the will to keeping doing this stuff in order to make it back to the Olympics, even if they have to cheat and game the system in order to do it.

The Lose awards the gold medal of these Olympics to Ester Ledecká, the gold-medal winning Czech snowboarder who also, for the hell of it, went over to run with the 2-plankers, used a pair of borrowed skis and won the women’s Giant Slalom. This reaction is priceless, as she could not believe she won. She just might be the coolest person in the universe:

The silver medal goes to “Team Reject,” the U.S. curling team, four guys who were basically told “you suck, now go away,” by the U.S. federation after the last Olympics but refused to do so, winning a gold medal and making curling cool in the process. Seriously, we need a rags-to-riches curling movie made, possibly directed by Christopher Guest. (The fact a Russian curler was caught doping makes all of this even more ridiculous. Why are you doping in curling? Just drink more beer!) This was some fun and fabulous stuff from Team Reject. I don’t know anything about curling, but I knew this shot was cool when I saw it:

The bronze medal goes to the U.S. women’s hockey team for finally beating those dirty, nasty, evil Canadians in the Olympics after 20 years of trying. This winning goal by Jocelyne Lamoureux in the shootout is filth. Pure filth. It was an incredible game. and, in the process of finally exorcising their Canadian dæmons, the U.S. women’s hockey team have now also carried on that time-honored Olympic tradition of reminding people in this country what a great sport hockey is, which will then be followed by a great number of enthusiastic, hopeful budding hockey fans tuning into NHL games and wondering why the product seems so bad: 

We have to give a shout-out to U.S. Speed Skating, who continue to be terrible and continue to be poorly attired. They win our Worst Dressed award for these Olympics. (French ice dancer Gabriella Papadakis wins our Least Dressed award). You may recall this imbroglio from four years ago about the high-tech suits Under Armour designed which they never properly tested. Well, Under Armour was back again in 2018 with this bizarre design highlighting skater’s privates which, well, make you wonder what the hell anyone involved in this process was thinking. Oh, everyone involved gave some reason why this special design would improve performance and such, but did you, you know, ever stop and look at them?

But Elizabeth Swaney wins the entire Olympics. She wins the whole thing. I award her one Olympics for her tenacity, naïveté, and for bringing some absurdity to a bloated event badly in need of it. She wins all the things. She is the true Lose Olympic hero.

Go big, Lizzie. Go big!

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me atinplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.