Mikaela Shiffrin could finally exhale after flying past the finish line to complete her opening run in the women’s giant slalom on Thursday morning. The interminable wait for the start of her Pyeongchang Olympics, which had stretched an additional 72 hours as extreme winds battered the hill and prompted a series of postponements, was over. The ebb and flow of her nerves had given over to muscle memory and emotion. Her date with destiny in the Taebaek mountains was here.

The 22-year-old American trailed by two-tenths of a second after a self‑described “solid” first trip down the tough, technical course. She would have one more attempt to make up the deficit and kick off her bid for multiple gold medals with the all-important first. So the Colorado native did what anyone else might do when faced with stifling, stomach-turning pressure: she took a nap.

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Then Shiffrin, laying second to the surprise leader, Manuela Moelgg of Italy, stirred from her slumber and delivered a second run worthy of the deafening hype to capture the gold medal that could be the first of several at these Winter Olympics. Her combined time of 2min 20.41sec over both runs was 0.39sec better than Norway’s Ragnhild Mowinckel, who won the silver. Federica Brignone, of Italy, was 0.46 off the pace to take bronze, becoming the first Italian woman in 16 years to win an alpine skiing medal.

“I do it in every race,” Shiffrin said of her catnap. “There’s always a bit of time between the first and second runs. I had about an hour where I could lie down on a bench in the corner of the lodge. I had my music on, my noise-cancelling headphones on, so I couldn’t hear anything but my music. That’s one of my favourite moments when I can lie down, take a deep breath and get ready for the second run.”

And what a run it was. Giant slalom does not come easy to Shiffrin, who described her “love-hate relationship” with her third-best discipline. The importance of getting off to a winning start in her assault on the entire alpine skiing programme cannot be overstated.

“It’s more difficult for me to find a really good rhythm [in giant slalom], so I need to train it a lot,” she said. “I need to be in a good mood, I need to be aggressive, and all of these things. It’s been more difficult than slalom for me. I’m just starting to find some connection with that this year and to do that today was just amazing.

“There were moments when I thought: ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough to do this,’ and then there were moments when I thought: ‘Who cares? You gotta try. You’re here.’ It’s an incredible feeling to know my best effort is good enough.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shiffrin joined Andrea Mead-Lawrence and Ted Ligety as the only American skiers to win two gold medals in alpine skiing. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock

Four years ago Shiffrin was the teenage prodigy who became the youngest Olympic slalom champion in history, cementing her supremacy in alpine skiing’s most technical discipline by winning the past three world championships in which she has competed. She has since blossomed from a specialist into perhaps the world’s best all-around skier, branching out into the speed events with success and winning last year’s overall World Cup title, a prize more coveted in the sport than Olympic gold.

It has all pointed towards a history-making medal haul in Pyeongchang. She is the favourite in Friday’s slalom and next week’s alpine combined, which comprises one downhill run and one slalom run. A possible medal in the downhill would match the record of four set by Croatia’s Janica Kostelic in 2002. (If not for the delayed start to the competition, she would have entered and contended in the super-G as well.)

“I don’t want to assume that anything else is going to happen,” said Shiffrin, who joined Andrea Mead Lawrence and Ted Ligety as the only American skiers to win two gold medals in alpine skiing. “Every single day is a new day. My only job here is to put out my best effort. Going into this Olympics I thought, yeah, I could come away with multiple medals, I could also walk away with nothing. And now I know I have something – that’s a really nice feeling.”

Shiffrin’s mother, Eileen, who doubles as one of her coaches, said the extended wait for the opener left her daughter “charged up” and ready for her bid at history. “She knew her skiing was good and was there and she just made up her mind to put it out there in the second run,” she said. “This sets her up confidence-wise. Just getting this race behind her is going to be a big relief.”

Waiting, as it turned out, was the hardest part. Shiffrin has improved on a fifth-place giant slalom finish in Sochi that had gnawed at her in the biggest way possible. Now she can turn her attention to her core discipline before looking ahead to next week.

“It’s been a mental strain the last couple of days, thinking we were going to race and then not racing, so to finally have the race actually happen today I was like, well, I really hope I can actually do it when the time comes. And I did, so now we got the ball rolling. I’m really excited for tomorrow.”