Very Special Episodes: How to Make the Olympics (Without Supernatural Athletic Ability)

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human I'm Bowen Yang And I'm Matt Rogers During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast In the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games We've been joined by some of our friends Hi Bowen, hi Matt Hey Elmo Hey Matt, hey Bowen Hi Cookie Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway And we are in Italy To give you experiences from our hearts to your ears Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:59forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:00Gretchen Wilson Chase Matthew Lauren Alaina Tickets are on sale now. Get yours before they sell out at Ticketmaster.com

2:14Think back to when you were a kid. What was your dream job? Was it to become an astronaut? Three, two, one, zero. A cowboy? Ballerina? Maybe you thought you could teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts. For some, the biggest dream was becoming an Olympic athlete. Standing on a podium in a far-flung locale, hearing your country's national anthem as you accept your gold medal. You've practiced waving to your family and friends who supported you on your way to glory.

3:00But childish dreams aren't meant to come true. Becoming an Olympic athlete is almost mathematically impossible. You have to win the genetic lottery. You have to dedicate your life to a sport. a sport where you're competing against the best your country has to offer. And that's just to get to the Olympics, where you then take on the world. When I was seven, I decided I wanted to make it to the Olympics. So it was my job to make it to the Olympics starting at age seven. Those odds did not discourage Elizabeth Swaney from Oakland, California. In fact, it was her mastery of those odds that led her on her path to the Olympics.

3:47And it was first for Olympic figure skating. That was the goal. But that obviously didn't happen. So it became then like rowing and I got involved in like baseball later on and ice hockey. So those were kind of the sports I was thinking of focusing on competitively before I transitioned to like skeleton and then freestyle. skiing, which was ultimately my Olympic sport. Elizabeth did end up becoming an Olympic athlete, but it wasn't supernatural athletic ability that got her there. And by the time she made it to the 2018 Winter Olympics, achieving her childhood dream, a lot of people were rooting against her.

4:32Well, knowing her personally, I just felt so bad for all the hate.

4:40Welcome to Very Special Episodes, an iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is Breaking the Olympics.

4:55Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. My name is Jason English. I'm usually joined here at the top by Dana Schwartz and Zarin Burnett. I'm solo today. I got to see Zarin out in San Francisco last week before the Super Bowl. iHeart builds these two stages and we record podcasts all week leading up to the Super Bowl. Football podcasts, comedy podcasts, Vanderpump Rules podcasts, you name it. Super Bowl's back in LA next year. Dana, Zarin, and I are already planning to bring very special episodes back to Radio Row, which is a good time. It's a surreal time, but fun. And football season is over now.

5:36So we're going to shift our focus to another sports obsession, the Winter Olympics. We've got a few Winter Olympics episodes coming. I've had curling on in the background all day. I don't quite understand it, but I like it. I like the sounds. I like visually very pleasing. So I will continue to watch that. You listen to this and give it back to Dana.

6:01Growing up in Oakland in the 90s, it was easy for Elizabeth to fall in love with the Olympics. Bay Area native Christy Yamaguchi became an international star during the 1992 Winter Games. I remember being captivated by the figure skaters during the Olympics in the early 90s. One person that I really looked up to is Christy Yamaguchi, and I was living in the Bay Area at the time. She won the gold medal, so she was really inspiring to me, so I started figure skating. That was my intro, really the sports, I think, figure skating. Probably Christy's greatest strength is her lack of weaknesses. She does everything so well.

6:47This is a very well-done combination spin. Every position is perfect.

6:56Figure skating was her early sports pursuit. But Elizabeth has a habit of trying everything the buffet of athletics and life has to offer. I did figure skating maybe like once a week growing up. Was part of the figure skating team in college and then later transitioned to like the ice hockey team. As a student at the University of California, Berkeley, Elizabeth won a spot on the men's rowing team, one of the power programs in the sport. Elizabeth was the coxswain, the person who steers the boat, strategizes, and barks orders at the rowers. In an interview with California Sunday Magazine, a college teammate described the normally kind and polite Elizabeth as a silent assassin.

7:44I actually credit that sport specifically, being on the Division I men's crew team, which was always one of the top three rowing programs in the nation, which helped with helping me kind of envision a future where I can compete at a national, international level, because that team is so hard to be on in such high performance. But yet, being a student and a member of the men's rowing team wasn't enough for Elizabeth. At the age of 19, she ran for governor of California in the 2003 recall election. That was the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gary Coleman from different strokes. Well, let me tell you something.

8:22The answer is clear. For the people to win, politics as usual must lose.

8:31Elizabeth went to grad school at Harvard, later ran for mayor of Oakland. She's a stand-up comedian, a stunt double in movies, a ski instructor, corporate recruiter, and yes, an Olympic athlete. When I first met her, she told me she had something like four or five jobs. And I'm like, how do you pull that off? That's Brendan Newby, a friend and fellow athlete in freestyle skiing. Newby competed in two Winter Olympics representing Ireland. He calls Elizabeth one of the nicest, smartest, and hardest-working people he's ever met. Most of the time, you kind of have to get her attention to get her to talk.

9:15So maybe she's doing her four and a half jobs in her head at the time. But she's smart enough to do that.

9:23By the time Brendan met Elizabeth, they were living in Utah, working toward their Olympic dreams. Elizabeth first tried skeleton. Have you seen Skeleton? It's a sport where competitors on tiny sleds launch their bodies down an icy bob sled track at speeds of 80 miles an hour. Eventually, she found the halfpipe event in freestyle skiing, which, hearing Brendan explain it, sounds equally terrifying. You have all these tricks you have to learn and all this stuff you gotta get done. and excuse my language, but new tricks are f***ing terrifying, man. The sport is absolutely gnarly. The halfpipe is 22 feet tall.

10:09It's not snow. It's solid ice. Our skis are as sharp as race skis because it's solid ice. And 22 feet tall, the best guys are going 18 to 22 feet out of it. So what? That's 44 feet off the ground. And if you go a little bit too far to the left, You're going to land flat on solid ice and then bounce 22 feet to the ground. Go too far to the other direction, you're just going to fall out of the sky. Freestyle halfpipe was not a natural fit for Elizabeth's background. She barely skied until her early 20s. But she saw freestyle skiing as the clearest pathway to competing at the Olympics. I think I'm like the best person in the world to try to figure out what sport someone can possibly make at the Olympics.

10:55and maybe like if they have background in a certain country or heritage there, like what country and what sport that might be a possibility for. Elizabeth's special insight was derived from something most of us hate to do, reading the rule book. I know the qualification standards for a lot of the sports, especially the winter ones, Les Miller with the newer Olympic sports. My own like coaches, I would coach athletes from several countries, even coaches and athletes from other countries, because I knew I was so well-versed in the rules. They would ask me like, hey, do you think I'm going to qualify for the Olympics?

11:30Or do you think my athlete's going to qualify? And this was like multiple countries, U.S. and non-U.S. countries would ask me.

11:40This obscure but useful knowledge helped her identify the best possible path to the Olympics. Elizabeth figured out that by consistently competing in Olympic qualifiers across the world, she'd accumulate enough points to get to the Olympics. But first, she had to find a country that she'd be eligible to represent at the Winter Games, and didn't already have someone competing in freestyle skiing. She wasn't good enough to represent the United States, which regularly competes for medals. Each country has their own set of rules to determine whether an athlete can represent them in the Olympics. Typically, an athlete needs some kind of link to the country through family or residence, but that's not always the case.

12:31For example, ahead of the 2008 Summer Games, Russia made a special exemption for women's basketball legend Becky Hammond to play for them, even though she previously played for the U.S. in other international tournaments and had no family history in Russia. Luckily for Elizabeth, she had connections around the world. She tried competing for her mother's homeland, Venezuela, a country that nearly touches the equator, not exactly a hotbed for winter sports. Then she decided a better path was through Hungary, where her grandparents were from. She mapped out a schedule, did the math, and figured out which events she would have to compete in to qualify.

13:17But all this mastering of the rulebook and an international family tree wasn't going to get her to the Olympics. It would take money. A lot of it. I mean, it's a lot. Picture this, and it's happened to me multiple times. You spend$1 ,200 to get to Europe and then$800 on accommodations, whatever. The whole trip is going to end up being like$4 ,000. You get there, weather blows it out, and the contest is canceled. Brendan estimates it costs up to$30 ,000 each session to compete for a spot in the Winter Games. That's winter sports. That's how it works. It sucks. For the top end of Olympic athletes, they've been competing in their sport since they were young.

14:05And as they show promise and keep winning events, it attracts sponsorship dollars, which cover all those costs. allowing the elite athletes to focus on performing, not budgeting. Elizabeth was the opposite of a freestyle skiing halfpipe prodigy. She spent an incredible amount of time, energy, and yes, money, to give herself a chance at realizing her Olympic dream. It wasn't easy for me to get involved in all these sports. I was always working multiple jobs. I almost had, I think, a few days off a year, And I was always trying to, like, put everything I earned into, like, paying for coaches or equipment.

14:53Elizabeth estimates 75 % of all the money she made went to training, food, and competing in competitions. But amazingly, her plan was working. Elizabeth's globetrotting, dream-chasing expedition came to a crescendo just a few weeks ahead of the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea. In late January that year, she got a call from the Hungarian Olympic Committee. She had a spot in the Olympics waiting for her. The only problem? She had to get from the West Coast to Budapest in less than 48 hours. So I had to ask friends, family, some strangers through crowdfunding, like, hey, can you help me fly to Europe, like, immediately so I can still be considered for the Olympics?

15:47So I didn't even have, like, enough funds on my own to do that. But thankfully, again, like, the community pulled together to make that, like, possible for me. And it also worked because I just had my jacket and, like, a briefcase. Even with her Olympic dream in sight, a dream she'd had since she was seven years old, Elizabeth knew that just getting to the Olympics wasn't the goal. The goal was competing in the Winter Games. There was no point where I was like, oh, this is like in the bag or secure super thrilled. There's no time to be like happy. It was more just like, hey, I have to make it to Budapest by Friday morning.

16:27And I have to hopefully like pass all these tests and then make it to the Olympics. So I was always like, boom, boom, boom. Here's the next task to do. When I finally like got to the Olympic Village, I realized, OK, I've like made it here. This is great. and that was the point where I knew I will have the opportunity to compete. So that was a positive thing. Elizabeth made it to South Korea, to the Olympics. And when she got there, her performance became one of the most talked about moments in the 2018 Winter Games.

17:03Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was out of breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.

17:49This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Nat Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bowen. Hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt. Hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:38segregation in the day integration at night when segregation was the law one mysterious black club owner had his own rules we didn't worry about what went on outside it was like stepping on another world inside Charlie's place black and white people danced together but not everyone was happy about it you saw the KKK yeah they were dressed up in their uniform The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now.

19:27Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

19:37This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Trainor, disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody. There were years, writer, where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened.

20:15Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a** to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

20:44The 2018 Winter Olympics was a contained capsule of global conflicts and issues. Held in the South Korean city of Pyeongchang, the Games featured a remarkable scene where athletes from North and South Korea competed together as a unified team in women's ice hockey. Athletes from Russia could not compete under their flag after a massive state-sponsored doping scandal was revealed following the 2014 Games. Yet even with this geopolitical confluence, so much of the online conversation was dominated by the non-medal-winning performance of freestyle skier Elizabeth Swaney.

21:33I would say maybe like 80 % of the world was kind of like negative or undecided about my Olympics performance that had something to say. It wasn't because she attempted a difficult trick or had an embarrassing fall. The reason why she became a lightning rod is because she didn't do much of anything during her run. Elizabeth simply went up and down, back and forth along the walls of the halfpipe. For one jump on her second run, the Olympic broadcast team measured she maxed out at 18 inches above the halfpipe. To put this into context, the gold medal winner Cassie Sharp from Canada hit nearly 14 feet.

22:23The closest Elizabeth got to getting some air was a little 180-degree spin, which got her a couple feet above the halfpipe. And that was it. She came in last in the competition, but among all the freestyle skiers, she received the most attention, which was not her intent. I was just trying to do my best, like try to treat it like every single day that I was training for Half Piper competing and Half Pipe trying to have fun at the same time. Just really grateful to be there. Some of the reaction was online anger. The idea that Elizabeth cheated the system. An unserious participant amongst a field of dedicated competitors.

23:11But Elizabeth Sweeney is not average. She is incredibly, incredibly below average. She's really not that good to be in the Olympics. She doesn't have Olympic standard skills. She decided to do absolutely nothing. She may have done the most embarrassing thing I have ever witnessed.

23:37Liz did nothing wrong. She didn't hack the system. She didn't do anything. She followed the rules to the letter. She knew the rules better than anyone. Brendan Newby says all this newfound attention on freestyle skiing was not a good thing. The jokes, the memes, it didn't help. But he says the blame should be directed away from Elizabeth. As far as Liz goes, I'll say there's two schools of thought. Mine is she did nothing wrong. She followed the rules to the letter. and the only people to blame if there's anyone to blame. I don't think this is like a, she didn't do anything wrong, so it's not like blame, but it would be the qualification criteria that the IOC and that FIS had set up.

24:28The other school of thought that frustrates people is the other girls that go out there and fall and get hurt that Liz beats by not doing anything. That's frustrating to the other girls. I know a women's coach that was really frustrated by it. And I have never once in my whole life seen Liz crash. So I do see why people got frustrated. But like, they took their anger out on the wrong people. They took it out on her when she just followed the rules. For Elizabeth, she drew encouragement from her fellow competitors while she was in the eye of the social media storm. Whenever I would hear like a negative thing, that really wouldn't affect me that much at all because I would think, okay, who are the experts in this sport?