A former Olympic snowboarder, who gave up the sport to become a porn star, has now revealed she wants to become queen of the slopes again.
Melo Imai gave up boarding after the 2006 Turin Games under intense scrutiny from the media and took to earning money as a hostess in a bar, as well as becoming a porn star in soft-core films.
Imai, a national hero at the time, competed for Japan as an 18-year-old in Italy but failed to win a medal in the halfpipe event.
She swapped the snow for pornographic films but is now back in snowboarding. Amazingly, she has just won a national competition with just four days of training.
The sport runs in Imai’s family. Her dad, Takashi Narita, is a snowboarding coach and one of her brothers, Dome Narita, was also a competitor in the sport.
“After the Olympics, I was making as much as a company president, and sometimes I’d go party at a host club and drop $9,000 in a single night,” Imai said of the career change.
But she had obviously not lost the snowboarding bug and decided to enter the All Japan Snowboarding Championships.
Imai smashed the opposition and took gold with a score of 90.75, way ahead of silver medallist Momoa Mori with 76.75.
“I want to return to the world of snowboarding, so I’m taking care not to get involved with things that are overly pornographic,” Imai, now 30, told Japanese media.
She is thought to be eyeing a spot in Japan’s Winter Olympics team for 2022.
They are set to be held in the Chinese capital, Beijing.
Japan’s women’s snowboarding team did poorly at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics this year.
Ninth was their best result.