Think back to when you were a kid.

What was your dream job?

Was it to become an astronaut, our biathlets, 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 waiving to your family and friends who supported you on your way to glory.

But 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.

Were 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 Swaeney from Oakland, California.

In fact, it was her mastery of those odds that led her on her path to the Olympics.

And it was first for Olympic figure skating.

That was the goal that that obviously didn't happen, so it became then like rowing, and I got involved in like baseball later on in ice hockey, so those were kind of the sports I was thinking of focusing on competitively before I transitioned to skeleton and then freestyle scheme, 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 twenty eighteen Winter Olympics, achieving her childhood dream, a lot of people were rooting against her.

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

Welcome to Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcasts.

I'm your host Danish Wartz, and this is breaking the Olympics.

Welcome back to Very Special Episodes.

My name is Jason English.

I'm usually joined here at the top by Danish Swartz and Zaren Burnett.

I'm solo today.

I got to see Zaron 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, Vander Pump Rules podcasts, you name it.

Super Bowls 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.

Football season is over now, so 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.

Growing up in Oakland in the nineties, it was easy for Elizabeth to fall in love with the Olympics.

Bay Area native Christi Yamagucci became an international star during the nineteen ninety two Winter Games.

I remember being captivated by the figure skaters during the Olympics in the early nineties.

One person that I really looked up to was Christi Amagucci, 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 to sports.

I think figure skating.

Probably Christie's greatest strength.

Is her lack of weaknesses.

She does everything so well.

This is a very well done combination spin.

Every position is perfect.

Figure 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 grown 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 coxin 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.

I actually like credit that sports, specifically being on the Division one 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 a 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 nineteen, she ran for governor of California in the two thousand and three recall election.

That was the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gary Coleman from different strokes.

Well, let me tell you something.

The ant says clear for the people to win, politics as usual must lose.

Elizabeth 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 Pece people he's ever met.

Most of the time you kind of have to get her attention to get her to talk.

So maybe she's doing her four and a half jobs in her head at the time, but she's smart enough to do that.

By 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 launched their bodies down an icy bob sled track at speeds of eighty 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 got to get done, and excuse my language, but new tricks are terrifying.

Man.

The sport is absolutely gnarly.

The half pipe is twenty two feet tall.

It's not snow, it's solid ice.

Our skis are as sharp as race skis because it's solid ice and twenty two feet tall.

The best guys are going eighteen to twenty two feet out of it.

So what that's forty four 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 twenty two 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 twenties, 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, and maybe like if they have background in a certain country or heritage, they're like, what country, 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.

Last Miller with the newer Olympic sports, my own coaches, I would coach athletes from several countries, even coaches and athletes from other countries because they 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 or do you think my athlete's going to qualify?

And this was like multiple countries, US and non US countries would ask me.

This 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 ski.

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 residents, but that's not always the case.

For example, ahead of the two thousand and eight 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 US 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.

But all this mastering of the rule book 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 twelve hundred bucks to get to Europe, and then eight hundred on accommodations whatever.

The whole trip is going to end up being like four ground You get their weather blows it out and the contest is canceled.

Brendan estimates it costs up to thirty thousand dollars 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 sports since they were young, and 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 like working multiple jobs, like I almost had like I think a few days off a year, and I was always trying to like put everything I earned into like pain for coaches or equipment.

Elizabeth estimates seventy five percent of all the money she made went to training, food, and competing in competitions.

But amazingly, her plan was working.

Elizabeth's globe trotting dream chasing expedition came to a crescendo just a few weeks ahead of the twenty eighteen 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 forty eight hours.

So I had to ask friends, family, some strangers through crowdfundinging, like hey, can you help me fly to Europe immediately so I can still be considered for the Olympics.

So I didn't even have 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 was no time to be like happy.

It was more just like, hey, I have to make it to Budapest by Friday morning, and I have to hopefully like pass all these tests and then make it to the Olympics.

So it was always like boom, boom, here's the next test to do.

When I finally got to the Olympic village, I realized, okay, I've like made it here.

This is great, and that was the point where I knew, like 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 twenty eighteen Winter Games.

The twenty eighteen 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 twenty fourteen 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 Swaeney.

I would say maybe like eighty percent of the world was kind of like negative or undecided about my Olympics performance.

That had something to say.

It wasn't because as 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 half pipe for one jump.

On her second run, the Olympic broadcast team measured she maxed out at eighteen inches above the half pipe.

To put this into context, the gold medal winner, Cassie Sharp from Canada, hit nearly fourteen feet.

The closest Elizabeth got to getting some air was a little one hundred and eighty degree spin which got her a couple feet above the half pipe, and that was it.

She came in last in the competition, but among all the freestyle skiers she received the most, 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 pyper 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 unseerious participant amongst a field of dedicated competitors.

But 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 had ever witness.

Liz 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 is 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 FIS had set up.

The 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 woman's coach that was really frustrated by it.

I've 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.

They're not someone who's just making commentary online.

They are my fellow competitors and fellow medal winners, and they were all supportive of me, Like Maddie Bowman she told me personally like we love you after the competition, so I knew I had the support of the best like athletes in the world.

For a brief moment, Elizabeth was one of the most talked about athletes in the world.

But even as the closing ceremonies were wrapping up and she was flying back home, all of that attention was already dying down, and that left Elizabeth in an odd position.

You see, a lot of her life had been focused around achieving this goal of becoming an Olympic athlete, and she did it.

Then she was left with the question, what do you do after you achieve your big dream?

It was just always a dream since age seven, and I was just guided by that dream.

I'm not sure if there's a good reason behind that, but I'm like, wow, no, I think back, like, oh, my my seven year old self kind of guided a lot of my life and into my twenties thirties.

I think it's the power of the dream really kept me going and kept motivating me to keep training, keep competing.

Elizabeth found new mountains to tackle, a focus other high achieving Olympians have shared.

Bill Bradley played for Team USA's basketball team in the nineteen sixty four Olympics, became a two time NBA champion with the New York Knicks, then switched to politics, spending eighteen years as a US Senator representing New Jersey.

Gold medal winning boxer George Foreman is probably known as much for selling plug in countertop grills as he is for throwing punches for Elizabeth, she still needed an outlet to put her energy.

She competed in American Ninja Warrior.

A connection there got her into stuntwork for movies, including the Steven Spielberg film The Fablemans.

She now runs a comedy show called Snarktang.

It mixes roast comedy with business feedback to startups.

When Elizabeth meets other people with big dreams, she tells them that the journey towards a goal is worth pursuing, even if the math is stacked against you.

I would say, there are no odds.

There's more.

There are sometimes obstacles, but you can use the obstacles as ways to help make you stronger.

And if there's haters along the way, I've realized and someone told me that, oh, haters are often just confused lovers.

So why else would they spend so much like energy and time thinking about you.

Also, there always are going to be supportive people for like a positive goal that someone has, there's almost always a path to achieve something, And even if you don't get to your final destination, there's going to be a great story to tell on a great journey along the way.

Eight years after making the Olympics, Elizabeth decided to chase that dream one more time, this time headfirst down in icy Bob's led track, trying to qualify for skeleton for Team Is.

It didn't take her back to the Winter Games, but that first dream had already changed her life, and honestly, skeleton sounds terrifying.

This might be for the best.

Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.

The show was hosted by Danish Wartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English.

Our senior producer is Josh Fisher.

Today's episode was written by Mike Smeltz, editing and sound design by Chris Childs, mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher.

Additional editing by Mary Doo, original music by Alice McCoy, Show logo by Lucy Kintamia.

Our executive producer is Jason English.

Got another Olympics tale coming next week.

We'll see you back here next Wednesday.

Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Urt Podcasts.