Lindsey Vonn meanwhile is looking to retain and re-establish her dominance. She won the downhill title in both 2015 and 2016 but slipped from Super-G champ in 2015 to the third-place finisher the following year.

Sofia Goggia finished first in both races in South Korea. Lindsey Vonn placed second, a mere +0.07 back in the downhill and just +0.04 off the pace in the Super-G.

“It was amazing,” says Sofia. “Especially because Lindsey Vonn showed up in qualification. When I crossed the finish line and saw I was ahead by a 100th [of a second] I was so happy. I couldn’t believe that I had won my first World Cup.

“I’m always honoured to be skiing with a legend like Lindsey Vonn, but also Mikaela Shiffrin and all of the others of course. Five years ago I was just looking at Lindsey on the TV, and then a few years ago I started competing with her and now I’ve beaten her in a race.

“It really is a dream come true.”

“I love the sport but even more than that, I love competition. It’s the will of racing and racing to win that moves me…”

On that day Sofia claimed her first two gold medals and set off 11 months of speculation over whether she would be able to repeat her winning result in Jeongseon at the Winter Olympics in February. The Winter Olympics are now less than two months away.

“I won the only two races that were in South Korea on the Olympic track, and they were on the test track for the Olympics, so of course everyone is asking me about that and I really do like the course, but we all know that things can change for better and worse from one day to another and from one year to the next.

“There will be different conditions and lots of different factors come February, so I hope that it will get even better for me but the Games are definitely still open.

“Of course though, like every athlete, you go to the Olympics because you want one thing – a medal.

“When you win you are the best in the world in that moment, but most of all it’s the end result of the trail that took you to that victory. It’s in that moment you complete your achievement. I was really happy about South Korea, but also particularly because of all that work that came before that World Cup and how it all counted.”

And that work was plentiful. Looking at a timeline of Sofia’s life in skiing is like looking at a long-term plan for how to set an athlete up for international success.

“I started skiing when I was four,” she tells us. “I have an older brother Tommaszo who is two years older than me and who started skiing first. When I was three years old I saw him skiing all the time and wanted to get involved. My mum didn’t let me, but the winter after that she brought me out to ski and I wanted to do everything my brother was already doing.

“I was lucky because I had a ski teacher who always believed in me and saw a little bit of talent and really helped me get confidence as a kid. Someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up when I was six years old and I always said I wanted to be a skier.

“I love the sport but even more than that, I love competition. It’s the will of racing and racing to win that moves me. It’s the passion for sport, but most of all for competing.”

It’s that drive which Sofia credits for her rise to the elite level of the sport, and the physical conditioning programmes and winter meditation that followed which she pins down as the reason she was able to move from competitor to gold-medal winner in the season past.

Sofia might be reluctant to admit that she is now one of the favourites for a medal spot come the starting gates in South Korea next February, but her instinctive competitiveness shines through when you ask her about her ambitions.

“The greatest skiers at the Olympics are the three at the top,” she says. “And the others are forgotten. If you are fourth you are nothing.”

It’s a truth you don’t hear Olympic athletes admitting every day.

We will have to wait to see if Goggia will indeed be able to reproduce the speed that saw her beat Lindsey Vonn and the rest of the field down the mountain in PyeongChang come March. The Jeongseon race course has already given Sofia her first taste of victory though, and we’re betting there are few other spots in the world where she would rather be competing to turn that World Cup gold medal into the most famous golden prize in sport.

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Stay tuned to our Dainese Luminaries hub for more from the world of ambition and adventure.

Next month we speak to Brady Leman, the Canadian ski-cross racer who missed out on a medal by one place at Sochi 2014, and is hoping to go at least one better this time around in PyeongChang.

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