Hanna Öberg deserves a little R&R this summer. But for the Swedish biathlete who won both gold and silver at Pyeongchang, there’s no let up.

At just 22 Öberg sits at the pinnacle of biathlon. Taken alongside some of the modern era’s freestyle snowboarders and skiers who barely seem to have entered their teens, that might not sound like such a tender age, but biathlon is a sport you mature into. In fact since its Olympic debut for women in 1992, Hanna is the joint youngest female to have won gold and the youngest of any competitor, male or female, to have won both gold and silver at the same Games, slogging her way to victory at the 15km individual and, a week later, to silver in the 4x6km team relay. No mean feat, even for a former world junior champion. So now that the snow has melted we mortals might consider Hanna about due for a holiday.

The cold reality though is that Hanna simply can’t afford to stop for a breather. To that end, it helps that the reality of her Olympic achievements still hasn’t fully permeated – because what better antidote to complacency than a healthy dose of incredulity?

“Thank you very much!” she says when I offer my congratulations on her achievement. “Yes, as you say it was so unreal for me in my first Olympics to win both a silver and a gold. To take the gold in the individual was of course something extra. It was a perfect race for me and thanks to that I could not only take the gold but also beat several of the girls I have been looking up to for years. Since I was a small girl the Olympics have been a big dream for me, so then to take medals in my first time, it is just unreal.”

If the result was incredible, Hanna’s performance was even more so. It was a victory hard-won. Pyeongchang’s winds, for which the 2018 Games were fast becoming renowned, harried the biathletes as much as any other outdoor competitors. The 15km Individual was scheduled for Valentine’s Day but with icy gusts sweeping across the Alpensia Cross-Country Centre, the event was postponed to the following day. Not ideal preparation from a psychological perspective. Come race day though, Hanna had arrived at a state of near-perfect physical and mental readiness: not only did she deliver an exemplary skiing performance, her shooting both standing and prone was flawless.

In Biathlon there are four sets of five targets. The contestant must stop at each set, discard skis and poles, bring their rifle round from their backs and steady it against the shoulder. For the uninitiated the concept of achieving any kind of stasis, finding a stillness somewhere between a pounding heart and pumping lungs, is impossible. And every missed target adds a minute to the finish time.