Meet Thailand's best skier

Now the 34-year-old wants to sweep down the slopes for Thailand at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

“You have to take risks in life every now and then, otherwise it’s no fun,” she says.

Vanessa-Mae Vanakorn Nicholson has been living in the Swiss alpine resort of Zermatt since 2009 and training for a slalom event. “Skiing has always been my hobby, and now that I live in the Alps, I thought it was time to set myself the challenge of bettering my skiing within a year,” she says.

Having amassed a US$60-million fortune by age 24 and become the wealthiest young entertainer in Britain, Vanessa-Mae can afford to pursue bold dreams. And her relatively advanced age is no hindrance to a spot on a national team hardly brimming with talent.

So for a year she plans to swap her violin and bow for skis and ski poles.

Vanessa-Mae did not inherit a skier’s genes. She was born in 1978 in Singapore to a Chinese mother and Thai father, and moved to London at age four with her mother.

A British citizen, she also holds a Thai passport and now wants to ski in the Olympics for her father’s homeland, despite having little to do with Thailand and knowing just “a couple of words” in the language. “It’s fun to finally get to represent my Thai side,” she explains.

The Thais like the idea. “We welcome her 100 per cent because everyone knows Vanessa-Mae,” says Tassanai Mukkawichit, head of external relations for the National Olympic Committee of Thailand (NOCT). He notes, however, that the musician had not yet contacted the NOCT and “all I ever saw her doing was play the violin, not ski”.

While there isn’t exactly a scramble for places on Thailand’s Winter Olympic squad, the Thais do not want to risk embarrassing themselves. “We need to know her ranking and qualifications before we can consider her wish,” Tassanai says.

The only person to have represented Thailand at the Winter Games to date did not cover himself in glory. Prawat Nagvajara, then a 43-year-old engineering professor, competed in cross-country skiing at Salt Lake City in 2002 and the 2006 Turin Games. “He didn’t win a medal – and he also broke his leg,” Tassanai reports.

Celebrated as a child prodigy, Vanessa-Mae made her international professional debut aged 10 at Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. At 13 she became the youngest soloist to record both the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky violin concertos, according to Guinness World Records. At 16, her first techno-pop-style album, “The Violin Player”, made her world famous.

Vanessa-Mae has said she was pushed hard by her ambitious mother and erstwhile manager, Pamela Nicholson, telling Britain’s Telegraph newspaper in 2008 that Nicholson said her love for her daughter was “conditional” on Vanessa-Mae’s performance as a musician.

“It was a pretty heartless thing to say,” Vanessa-Mae comments. When she was 21 she sacked her mother as manager, and the two broke off contact.

Asked whether there were parallels in the pursuit of perfection on the violin and on the slopes, Vanessa-Mae replies, “Technique, experience and sensitivity are key.”

Thailand has until January 27 next year to submit its final list of Sochi contestants to the International Olympic Committee.