Winter Olympics: In 52 gold-medal seconds, Mikaela Shiffrin rewrote her entire legacy.

MILAN — There are bad omens, and then there are the grim tidings that rose up before Mikaela Shiffrin in the most important race of her life. Olympic preparation can take you a long way, but it can’t quite prepare you for what she saw in front of her as she prepared to take her second, and final, run in the women’s slalom in Cortina.

Shiffrin had laid down the fastest time in the first run, meaning she had the chance to watch every single medal-capable skier post their second run before she skied. Two skiers before Shiffrin’s turn, Sweden’s Cornelia Oehlund was carving out a fast time — 0.22 ahead of the leaders’ pace, to start — when disaster struck from nowhere. Oehlund’s left pole snapped, leaving her holding the stub and scrambling for balance. She held on as long as she could, then spun out and failed to finish.

An even worse fate awaited Germany’s Lena Duerr, the second-fastest skier in the first round. As Duerr pushed onto the course, her right ski clipped the wrong way around the first gate, an instant disqualification seconds into a potential medal run. That’s an elementary-level mistake, and a heartbreaking one.

Shiffrin had to watch all this unfolding right in front of her as she prepared to ski her second run. But this wasn’t any ordinary race; Shiffrin can, and does, handle those with ease. This was the Olympics, the demon that has tortured and tormented Shiffrin for so many years now. On her back hung the weight of expectation, pressure, condemnation, anxiety.

And somehow, for the first time in eight years, she used all that weight to propel her, not drag her down. Shiffrin fired down the course in Cortina at such a speed that she increased her already-massive lead over the field, from 0.82 to 1.5 seconds. She claimed her third Olympic gold medal, and reclaimed her headspace.

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