Sweden’s Sara Hector won the Olympic women’s giant slalom on Monday to punctuate an astonishing reversal of form in the technical discipline hours after Mikaela Shiffrin’s bid for a record medal haul in Beijing was thrown off course with a rare disqualification.

The 29-year-old Hector completed two runs down the steep descent known as the Ice River in a combined time of 1min 55.69sec, coming in 0.28sec faster than Italy’s Federica Brignone, who settled for silver, and 0.72sec better than Lara Gut-Behrami of Switzerland, who took bronze.

Hector’s moment of triumph came at the expense of Shiffrin, the American star and one of the faces of these Winter Games who missed a gate early in her opening run as she began the first of five gold medal attempts in China.

The 26-year-old overall World Cup leader, the seventh racer out of the starting gate, was unable to hold the edge of her ski on the icy surface and skied out five turns in, falling on her left hip and ending her Olympic title defense only seconds into her Beijing debut.

Hector’s timing, meanwhile, has been perfect. Six weeks ago, she earned her second career World Cup win and first in seven years at a giant slalom in Courchevel, having finished 12th, eighth, 20th, DNF, 10th, DNQ, 28th and 10th in her previous eight starts in the discipline.

Since then, the Swede has seemingly flipped a switch with five straight podiums including three wins from her last five giant slalom races. The sixth on Monday was the biggest of all.

“Crazy,” said an elated Hector, who had never finished higher than seventh place in 14 previous individual Olympic or world championship attempts. “I’m so proud, I can’t put it into words. I really tried to push it and give it all I got. It’s just amazing.”

Her predecessor as Olympic champion was left to reflect on the miniscule margins at elite level. “I won’t hide the disappointment but I’m not going to dwell on it because that won’t help me,” a downcast Shiffrin said afterward. “I felt that I was pushing really quite well and attacking. But there was just one turn, I had a small, small mistiming when I really went to push on my edges and that makes all the difference.”

It marked only the third time in four years that Shiffrin has failed to finish a race and the 14th in a total of 229 starts across all disciplines at World Cup, Olympic and world championship events. Her most recent DNF in a giant slalom came during the first run of a January 2018 race at Kronplatz, Italy, two weeks before the Pyeongchang Games.

A survey of Shiffrin’s form in the 28 giant slalom races she’s entered since then places the shock of Monday’s miscue into scale: nine wins, 17 podiums and one finish worse than seventh.

“It doesn’t happen too often that I am falling,” she said. “I have been really working on the right timing of my turns and really never thought this was going to be part of the issue. But it wasn’t because I was holding back, so I can be proud of that. But it’s five turns into the Olympic GS, there’s disappointment for sure.”

The Colorado native was one of 22 non-finishers, more than a quarter of the 82 total entrants, who struggled on the icy surface of the unfamiliar piste on the south side of Xiaohaituo Mountain, where the usual test events that allow skiers to get used to the mountain were canceled due to Covid. Italy’s Marta Bassino, who won the World Cup giant slalom title last season and drew the No 5 bib on Monday, also fell early in her run.

The carnage continued into the second run as a total of 11 skiers, including French medal contender Tessa Worley, either crashed or missed gates.

At one point the afternoon session was delayed for about 15 minutes when Nina O’Brien of the United States, who was sixth-fastest after her first run, was stretchered out of the finish area following a violent crash by the last gate. A US ski team spokesperson said O’Brien was “alert and responsive”.

Slovakian star Petra Vlhová, the six-time world champion medallist who has never finished on an Olympic podium, failed to improve on her position after her first run and finished 2.46 back in 14th place.

Shiffrin, whose three Olympic medals include gold in slalom in 2014 and in giant slalom in 2018, has said her plan is to race all five individual events in Beijing. Her next crack at becoming the first US alpine skier to win three Olympic golds will come on Wednesday in the slalom.

“I’m going to reset, focus on what I can control for the slalom,” Shiffrin said. “There’s still a long two weeks to go and I’m still looking forward to it. I’m sorry that that was the performance I did today.”

Once a teenage prodigy who became the youngest Olympic slalom champion in history at the Sochi Games, Shiffrin has since blossomed from a specialist into the world’s best all-around skier, branching out into the speed events with success and becoming the only skier, male or female, to win World Cup races in all six disciplines.

Her 73 career wins on alpine skiing’s top circuit are third-most on the all-time leaderboard, trailing only Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark (86) and longtime US team-mate Lindsey Vonn (82).