Meet Malaysia's first family of skiing

A fanciful idea that started out as a joke among young members of one of Malaysia's most prominent families has snowballed into a fully fledged ski team and dreams of Olympic success.

Despite being a tropical, snowless country, Malaysia has created its own alpine ski team - albeit with only two members - and competed at the 8th Asian Winter Games, which wrapped up last week in Sapporo, Japan.

Unlike the antics of Venezuela's Adrian Solano, who wobbled amateurishly around the slopes at the recent Nordic World Ski Championships in Finland, both Malaysians are accomplished skiers, driven by the ambition of promoting winter sports in a country where soccer and badminton dominate.

Partly inspired by the Jamaican bobsledders who defied conventional wisdom by competing at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, more and more warm-weather countries have been entering teams in snow and ice events in recent years.

Othman Mirzan, grandson of former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, thought his country should do the same after flippantly suggesting his family had already begun their own team.

"It started as a joke. My siblings and I all skied together and the running joke was always that we were the Malaysian ski team because we're the only Malaysians people see skiing," he said.

"From that, the idea kind of grew. It started out as 'Let's see if this is viable' and then when we figured out it was, we had to see what it takes.

"There's a lot of rings you have you have to jump through. I was 17 at the time and no one takes a 17-year-old seriously when they are trying to start a national association, but the Malaysian Olympic Committee were very enthusiastic."

'Doesn't like the cold'

Mirzan, 22, said his famous grandfather, Malaysia's prime minister from 1981-2003 and still highly influential in the country, is an enthusiastic supporter of the team, although he hasn't seen them race live.

"He doesn't like the cold so he doesn't come to the races, but I know he's very proud of what we've done," Mirzan said.

"At the end of the day his mantra for his years in office was 'Malaysia can' - so being able to represent Malaysia in a field that has never been represented before, for me, that is pushing the envelope and what he was and is all about."

After setting up a national ski federation, Mirzan moved to the United States and attended the University of Colorado, but remained the sole member of the Malaysian team.

Unknown to him, a former coach of top US downhiller Lindsay Vonn had implanted a similar idea in the head of another young Malaysian, Jeffrey Webb, who was born in Kuala Lumpur but moved to the US when he was five years old.

A competitive ski racer, Webb caught the eye of the coach at a training academy in Washington state, who suggested he look at the possibility of skiing for his native country on the international stage.

Webb, just 18 and still in high school, never took the idea too seriously until his father read in a ski magazine that Mirzan had started a Malaysian ski federation.

Olympic dreams

"We go back to Malaysia for three months every year and when we were there we contacted the Malaysian minister of sport," said Webb's father, Steve .

"We were thinking it might take about two years to get through to someone as important as a minister, but he was very interested in developing new sports. To our surprise he actually contacted us straight away and said come in and talk.

"It was really perfect timing, and the rest is history."

Mirzan and Webb soon met up in Minnesota and started hatching their plans to put Malaysia on the alpine skiing map, but not as a novelty act. They both want to be competitive.

Mirzan broke the ice when he entered this year's world championships in St Moritz, Switzerland. Then both were selected for the Asian Winter Games, with Webb finishing 15th and Mirzan 24th in the men's giant slalom.

(China Daily 03/05/2017 page11)