Swaney grew up in a bilingual Spanish–English household in the Oakland Rockridge neighborhood, and attended high school in Lafayette.[2] Her father owns an insurance agency and her mother is a Spanish interpreter. She has a brother. In her youth, Swaney was the only girl in her local soccer and Little League teams and in high school, 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.[3] She then earned a master's degree from Harvard University in design studies with a focus on real estate.[4] While at Harvard, she volunteered as the assistant coach for their Track and Field team.[4][5]
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.[3] 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.[2] She then turned to skeleton, in which she competed internationally,[6][7] and freestyle skiiing, in which she sought to represent Venezuela, her mother's homeland, at the 2014 Winter Olympics.[8][9] She started skiing for Hungary in 2015, based on her grandparents' country of birth.[10]
Olympic qualifying
Swaney qualified for the 2018 Winter Olympics representing Hungary in half-pipe skiing.[11] Beginning in 2013[12] she attended all the World Cup qualifying events over the two Olympic qualifying years, and the 2017 World Championship in Sierra Nevada, Spain. In order to qualify for the Olympics, athletes needed to place in the top 30 at either a FIS Freestyle Ski World Cup event or FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships, and score a minimum of 50.00 FIS points.[13] Swaney achieved this by attending competitions with fewer than thirty participants,[10] with one event in China having fifteen (in which she placed thirteenth). Thirteen of her top 30 finishes were a result of her showing up, not falling, and recording a score.[14] As a result of Swaney's selection of competitions, she was ranked 34th in her run up to the Olympics.[10] The Olympic quota system also aided in her qualifying. While 24 women were able to compete in half-pipe competition, there are limits on the number of skiers each country could send. The maximum a country could send was twenty-six (with maximums of fourteen men and fourteen women) across all freestyle skiing events.[15] So while the United States had six women ranked within the top 20 in the world in halfpipe skiing, only four were allowed to compete 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.[6][10]
2018 Olympics
At the 2018 Winter Olympics, Swaney competed in the women's half-pipe, in what was described as a "perfectly mediocre run", without falling. She scored 30.00 and 31.40, "barely attempting a trick" in either of her two runs. She placed last in the competition, 13.60 points behind Laila Friis-Salling of Denmark, who had fallen in both of her qualifying runs.[14] The incident prompted the Hungarian Olympic Committee (MOB) to reevaluate its selection process,[12] and possible changes to the quota system.[4] As of 2021, no changes have been made to the FIS freestyle ski selection process in halfpipe skiing.[16]
While critics called her Olympic performance a "mockery", she received support from Canadian gold medalist skier Cassie Sharpe, who said, "If you are going to put in the time and effort to be here, then you deserve to be here as much as I do."[4][10][12][17] Gold medalist Maddie Bowman, and David Wise, a double gold medalist, also defended her.[17]Jeff Passan from Yahoo Sports was one of the few to interview Swaney at the games and wrote a piece, "Is Elizabeth Swaney the worst Olympian? Actually, she might be the best."[18]
2028 Summer Olympics
Swaney seeks to qualify to represent Hungary as a powerlifter at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; she became interested in the sport while training in skeleton, and focused on it during the COVID lockdown.[2]
Personal and professional life
Swaney has worked as a technical recruiter for Thumbtack,[6] as a barista, and as a stand-up comedian and producing tech pitch roast comedy shows.[2] She is certified as a skiing instructor and a weightlifting coach.[2] She competed in qualifiers for American Ninja Warrior in 2018[6][19][20] and is the Finance Director for Spinsters of San Francisco.[5]
