By their number of Twitter followers shall ye rank and file them. When he woke up yesterday morning,

young Austrian skier Matthias Mayer was barely into three figures. Understandable in a way – he'd only joined up a few weeks ago and even then it was at the behest of a sponsor taking a punt that Sochi might pump a little juice into their client's brand.

Still, it said something about his profile within the sport. The sexy choice, he was not. The two favourites for gold in yesterday's men's downhill were Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway (86,000 followers) and Bode Miller (42,000) of the US.

Mayer, as befitting someone who had never won a World Cup race and who wasn't even sure of his place in the Austrian team a fortnight ago, had 300 or so. You wouldn't say it ranks high on the list of things that will change in his life on the back of a couple of minutes' skiing yesterday but that number isn't around 300 any more.

Gold medal
Mayer won the first skiing gold of the Sochi games by 0.06 seconds from Italy's Christof Innerhoffer, with Kjetil Jansrud of Norway a further 0.04 seconds back in third. Svindal could only manage fourth, Miller fading to a wan eighth after building a decent early lead.

“I was very self-confident this week,” said Mayer, whose father won silver in the super-G in 1988. “The turns are just right for me. And the hill is just right for me. It wasn’t until I got on the podium that I realised I was the Olympic champion.

“It’s unbelievable. I’ve only dreamed of this, and now my dream has come true. I woke up this morning and knew I could win this race. I was smiling the whole day, throughout inspection. It was my day.”

For the Blue Riband of the games, the men’s downhill has an eccentric history of throwing up shock winners. France’s Jean-Luc Crétier took gold in 1998 having never won a downhill race before and without ever winning one again.

Austria's Leonhard Stock was 21 when he won his first downhill race at the 1980 Olympics. He had to wait until he was 30 to win his second.

Unexpected
Mayer is 23 and was considered a name for the future. Nobody predicted that future to be now. Least of all those who know him best. "A start like this, this is maybe something we didn't expect," said his coach Mathias Berthold. "He seemed pretty confident but I wasn't sure.

“He’s not an experienced guy so you never know what he’s going to do. He always does something stupid because he’s so young. You know, he’s the youngest of the top 30 here.”

Yet here he sits, Olympic champion. Provider of immediate solace for Austria too, whose skiers came home from Vancouver four years ago disgraced having for the first time ever not won a medal of any colour. To get one – the big one – so early is huge. No such solace for the vanquished.

Miller was the fastest skier in practice on Rosa Khutor and had been tanking along so well in the early part of his run that was ahead of Mayer’s time when he hit the middle section.

But he got too close to a gate, lost a couple of hundredths and wasn’t helped either by a day that started more overcast than it had been all week but got sunnier as the morning wore on.

"I'm not really sure what went wrong," said Miller. "The visibility is different today and that's the only disadvantage I had. But it's something I face all the time. If the visibility is really good, I can ski my best. If it isn't, I can't. I wanted to ski it as hard as I could and not really back off, but it requires a lot of tactics today, which I didn't apply. I feel disappointed."

'Super-consistent'
As for Svindal, he was the only one to drop Mayer's name during the week when people were looking for dangers to him and Miller. "I looked at the times in training, and he was super-consistent," said Svindal. "Bode was fast. I was fast. But he was the most consistent of us all."

And so it proved.

Mayer was quickest on the second part of the course but nowhere else did he pick up noticeable time on the field. Starting early – he was 11th to go – helped as the snow softened a little when the sun came out. He was steady throughout and it won him gold in the end.

“Today I wasn’t tense at all. I realised the day before yesterday that I was too tense and so I wasn’t tense. I tried to be really really relaxed here and concentrate only on what I have to do.

“I think the numbers around 10 had a bit of an advantage because the sun was coming out. Later on, that snow got a little soft I think and a few hundredths of a second came as an advantage for us.”

In a race of hair breadths, it was enough. Enough to change a life. Endorsements will follow now, all the more so if he backs it up later in the week in the super-G which is his best event.

At last count as darkness fell over the mountains at Rosa Khutor, he was up to 1,550 Twitter followers – and rising fast.