Violinist Vanessa Mae Wants to Ski in 2014 Olympics

Downhill Diva: A Singapore-born British violin diva wants to ski for Thailand in Sochi.

Violin diva Vanessa Mae may become the first music star to compete in the Olympics if she succeeds in her bid to qualify for 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

Mae is a native or Singapore but hopes to represent Thailand, her father’s country, in the slalom and the giant slalom at the next winter games, according to a report Tuesday in Russia’s state-run Russia Today.

Mae had sought to compete in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics but was foiled by the Thai Olympic Committee’s demand that she give up her British citizenship. She had become a citizen of the United Kingdom at an early age after her Chinese mother divorced her Thai father and remarried a British man.

Since then the Thais have had a change of heart and will let Mae compete with a dual citizenship.

Mae’s chances of qualifying are boosted by the fact that tropical Thailand has no winter sports program. The only athlete ever to compete for the nation in a winter games was men’s cross-country skier Prawat Nagvajara in 2002 and 2006.

But Mae’s entry into the Sochi Games isn’t really up to the Thais. To qualify she has to earn a threshold number of points in international competitions under requirements set by the International Ski Federation. That means she would first have to qualify for the 2013 World Championships.

Mae, 31, started skiing at the age of four, a year before she picked up the violin. But it was the violin that gave her the global success that affords her the luxury of spending months of every year skiing in Zermatt, Switzerland where she owns an apartment near ski runs.

She was just eight when she became the youngest student at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Her fame as a child prodigy helped her sell 10 million albums that year. At 13, she was the youngest soloist to record both Beethoven and Tchaikovsky concertos.

“I’m lucky that having begun my musical career so young, it’s rather wonderful that I can now focus on my hobby,” she said recently. “Not that I’m putting my day job on hold. Music will always be my greatest passion. There are still the concerts. But now I am no longer recording an album a year as I did in my teens. To be honest, that became a treadmill. The endless touring, the promotions. By the time I got to 20, I was no longer enjoying it.”

“I know I am always going to be a few points behind the top guys,” Mae says of her Olympic dreams. “I am taking a plunge. I am British, but realistically there is no way I could represent my own country. But because my natural father is Thai, they have accepted me.”