The event is due to start tomorrow and Edlinger will look to show the form she had as an 18-year-old three years ago when she won two gold medals and a bronze, having spent most of the last year ridden with health and financial setbacks.

The visually-impaired athlete, along with her brother Julian who acted as her guide, won both sprint and long-distance cross country events as well as finishing third in the middle-distance one in 2017. 

"Finsterau is quite a special place for me," Edlinger said. 

"The World Championship in 2017 was my first one and it totally felt like a home World Championship. 

"The Bavarian people are pretty similar to the Austrian and they treated me as their own athlete and I soon got a lot of new fans.

"A lot of family members came over to celebrate and watch the races. 

"It was an unforgettable experience for us all and, of course, getting double world champion and a bronze is not every day."

After Finsterau, Edlinger went on to win four gold medals in her first career World Cup season, dazzling to become the overall Crystal Globe cross-country winner. 

The accolade stayed with Edlinger for three consecutive years and was on top again at the 2019 World Championships in Prince George in Canada, where she skied with a new guide, Florian Rupert Seiwald. 

The pair won gold medals in the sprint and long distance, and a silver in the middle-distance race.

But after the Paralympic Games in Pyeongchang in 2018, Edlinger was paralysed from the neck down, something she still struggles with. 

There were further setbacks when Edlinger could no longer race with her new guide, Sweden's Johannes Andersson for international races because they were not from the same country. 

"I decided to move to Sweden over the winter to get in some training, which got me into huge finance troubles," Edlinger said, 

"In spring I had a difficult operation, had a tough way to get back and to figure out how to come back to ski this season."

Her early World Cup results in December saw Edlinger struggle in 11th in the short-distance race and pulled out of the middle-distance event before winning silver in the sprint later that week.

By January she was consistently back in the medals with a gold in the sprint and a silver in the short-distance.

She is currently third in the overall cross-country World Cup rankings behind Russia’s Vera Khlyzova and Belarus’ Sviatlana Sakhanenka.

All of her top rivals, including Khlyzova and Sakhanenka are expected to be in Finsterau.

Finsterau will be the last World Cup event before the World Championships and the World Cup finals, both due to take place in in Östersund in March.