Winter Olympics: Why did Elizabeth Swaney run the halfpipe without tricks?

Before the ski halfpipe women’s final shows off the best of the sport on Tuesday night, take a look back at the most bizarre run from Monday’s qualification round.

There are safe runs, and then there is what Hungarian skier Elizabeth Swaney did during the qualification runs of women’s ski halfpipe on Monday at the 2018 Olympics.

When athletes make it to the Olympics, the expectation is usually that they will be throwing their biggest tricks in order to when the gold. In the women’s ski halfpipe, that would mean seeing big air combined with many spins and flips. And this held true for most of the skiers, except for Hungary’s Elizabeth Swaney.

She had a unique approach to landing a clean, safe run, not throwing any tricks. Swaney, who was born in the U.S. but now skis for Hungary, just simply rode from side to side in the halfpipe. She never got any air and her tricks were limited to a couple of 360s. When commentators start making jokes about maybe seeing a big trick in the second run, as the Canadian broadcasters did, maybe it is time to pick a new strategy.

By the end of the second run, she was sitting in last place, scoring just 31.40 points. While a slight improvement over her first run, it was nowhere near the 72.80 needed to crack the top 12 and ski the final. Still, post race, Swaney was disappointed and thought she should have made the final.

As strange as it was to see a run like that in the Olympics, it is consistent with what Swaney has been doing at competitions all year. To make the Olympics the 33-year-old had to rack up a certain number of qualification points. So, she would show up at competitions, put down runs with very few tricks, but she showed up and that was enough to earn her a trip tp the Olympics.

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But just for comparison sake, take a look a Canadian Cassie Sharpe’s run that earned her the top score in qualification. Sharpe landed the first ever cork 1080 by a woman at the Olympics. A better preview of what should be seen in the final.

Still, Swaney did what most people will never accomplish, she made it to the Olympics. Something she failed to do in 2014 as a Skeleton athlete for Venezuela. Prior to becoming an Olympic athlete, Swaney ran for governor of California at 19.