The 79-year-old Norwegian, whose collection of 27 medals - 22 of them gold - over five Winter Games from 1988 to 2002 makes her the most decorated winter Paralympian in history, addressed the question as boldly as any icy slope in her long and uniquely successful career.

"Of course they should do it," she said in reference to the International Paralympic Committee's decision that Russian and Belarus representatives would be banned from the Games - in line with the International Olympic Committee’s position - a day after it had announced they would be allowed to compete under the Paralympic flag.

"It’s not different between the Paralympics and the Olympics.

"I was not surprised when the IPC didn’t ban the Russian and Belarus athletes, but I was disappointed.

"I am so glad they changed their mind.

"If they had said they could compete I think all the other countries would have said: 'We are not.'"

The IPC shift was indeed forced by multiple National Paralympic Committees threatening a boycott.

The IPC President Andrew Parsons said nations were "likely to withdraw" if the two teams were not pulled, stating there would not be a "viable Games".

Myklebust, who retired aged 58 after winning five golds at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games, her fifth Winter Olympics, will be watching the Beijing 2022 Games with keen interest on TV from her home in Oslo.

And she is keeping her fingers crossed in particular for the chances of her compatriots Vilde Nilsen and Hakon Olsrud in the cross-country skiing in which she won 16 of her gold medals, remaining unbeaten throughout her Paralympic career in short, middle and long-distance races.

The bulk of those medals - along with the two she won in biathlon and the four she picked up in ice sledge speed racing - are long gone to museums in Oslo or Lillehammer, where she competed in her third Winter Paralympics in 1994.

"I love to win, of course, but just - the medals, I have never been a person who wants to keep the medals so they have just been put away in boxes until I gave most of them away.

"It was the competition which was the most interesting thing, not the medals."

You can’t argue with that. 

But there are others, not least Olympic and Paralympic historians, who find her medals, and medal record, entirely captivating.

Only USA’s 41-time swimming Paralympic champion Trischa Zorn holds more titles than the Norwegian but she competed at the Summer Games.

Germany´s Reinhild Moeller, who competed between 1980 and 2006 and Gerd Schoenfelder, active between1992 and 2010, are nearest to her in terms of Paralympic gold medals, each having won 16 in Alpine skiing.

In truth, it is hard to see Myklebust’s Winter Paralympic haul being bettered.

"I am not sure if my record will ever be broken," she said. 

"I think competition nowadays has gotten harder than when I used to compete."

Myklebust also has 14 golds more than her compatriot Marit Bjorgen, the most-decorated winter Olympian ever.

"I actually never think about being the most-decorated winter Paralympian ever," she said. 

"It is only when they mention the athletes who have won more medals, and they talk about able-bodied athletes while say nothing about us that I think about it."

That said, the recent award made to her and Kevin Coombs - Australia’s first indigenous athlete to compete in the Paralympics or Olympics who competed in wheelchair basketball and athletics across five Paralympic Games from the first, in 1960, to 1984 - registered deeply.

"It was a different kind of honour," she reflected. 

"To be honoured by that announcement was a special, personal thing."

But then Myklebust, sharp and funny, is a special kind of person.

She has said in the past that one of the reasons for her success in Paralympic sport stemmed from the strength she had built up in her arms, which she would use to move swiftly after she had been afflicted by polio at the age of two.

"In my family I was treated just like my sisters," she recalled to the IPC. 

"We were four girls and I was number three. 

"I don’t know why but my parents thought I could do the same as the rest of the family.

"I had a love of sport and a love of winning. 

"When I was a kid I tried skiing like all other kids. 

"They started a group for disabled people to try different kinds of sports so I started with table tennis. 

"I was rather good in that for some years, but I liked winter and skiing.

"After some years the tracks were too difficult for me so then in 1984/85 it was the first time I tried to sit and then I realised 'wow this was easy' so I kept on.

"I was astonished when some of the competitors said 'oh it is so hard'.

"I was rather strong in my arms because when I started to walk I just walked like a monkey on my hands.

"I was able to climb up the rope to the roof without using my feet and no one else in my class could do that."

She told insidethegames she used her hands to walk most often when she was playing with other children.

"When I got polio, I got it in both legs and in my lower back and stomach, so I never could walk quite normally.

"Normally I could walk although I had to use my right hand to keep my right leg normal because it wouldn’t work properly.

"But when I was playing with others, I had to try to run and had just to use my hands."

So much for her physical strength. 

Where did her enormous strength come from?

"When I was young I never thought about it," she said. 

"But looking back it was like this. 

"You have two options.

"Either you sit down, open your hand and mouth and say 'Feed me', or you say, 'give a damn, I want to do it myself.'

"And with two older sisters and one younger, no one had pity for me. 

"I had to fight just to be like the other ones, my sisters and other people, as much as I could. 

"For me it was no option.

"If I had tried to just sit back, my sisters and parents would have said 'Don’t be lazy.'"

Myklebust has previously related to the IPC, a telling moment she experienced while competing in her first Paralympics at Innsbruck in1988:

"It was the 2.5km cross-country race. 

"It was a little uphill, but nothing that was a concern. 

"I noticed there were people at the side of the course, and I wondered why they were there. 

"I soon found out when they tried to push us up the hill - they thought we needed their help. 

"I shouted, 'go away!' and they soon left us alone, but I was really annoyed with them for thinking we couldn’t do it."

Asked if she felt attitudes have since changed towards Paralympians, she told insidethegames: "Yes, they have. 

"But still ordinary people have another attitude. 

"Still, people tell me: 'Oh, you are so clever'. 

"That makes me so angry because that is the word used to tell children - 'Oh, you are so clever, you can do this and that.'

"I am 79 years old and you do some things that are difficult or whatever. 

"But when I am, say, just walking, and someone will say to me 'You are so clever!' - I could kill them!

"It’s like they have tried to tell me that I am just a stupid little girl - and I am not. 

"Yes, I would say it was a patronising attitude.

"And also people say, 'Oh, I love to watch the Paralympics much more than the Olympic Games because the Para-athletes are so clever.'

"We train just like other people, and we are just like other people, but it is very hard to explain that we are not special. 

"It is only that we cannot do certain things. 

"What we do we try to do normally."

Myklebust’s husband, Olai, was a visually impaired Paralympic cross-country skier at the 1984 Winter Games at Innsbruck, where he won a gold in the men’s 4x10 kilometres Relay B1-2, and at the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville.

She thought of retiring after the latter Games, where she herself won sixth and seventh golds in cross-country sitski competition over 2.5 and 5 kilometres, but when her husband became involved with the Norwegian team as a physio, she opted to carry on as a competitor.

"I decide to retire after we competed in France," she recalled. 

"I thought - 'now is enough'. 

"But then my husband was continuing with Norway so I thought 'why should I stop?'"

She thus went on to the home Winter Paralympics at Lillehammer in 1994, where she added to her collection another four cross-country sitski golds, a gold, two silvers and a bronze in the ice sledge speed racing and a bronze in the biathlon.

And on again to the 1998 Nagano Winter Paralympics, where she won a biathlon gold and four cross-country skiing golds.

And on again, aged 58, to the Salt Lake City Paralympics of 2002 - where she won five more golds including one in biathlon.

"After Salt Lake I was too old so it was easy to say now it is OK to retire," she reflected. 

"But of course after that it is the World Championships and if you see it you think - 'Oh! Should I be there?'

"But then I didn’t train that much any more so it became easier."

Away from the slopes, she has followed a career as a physiotherapist. 

Shoulder problems mean she has been unable to ski for a number of years but she continues to get and about on an e-bike. 

"I try to do as much as possible and use as little electricity as possible," she said.

"We live in a small town of 10,000 people and the grown-ups know who I am but the younger people don’t. 

"As time goes on, in a way it’s forgotten.

"My daughter lives in England and when people asked her why she doesn’t compete she says, 'it is enough with two idiots in the family'."

Myklebust has named different highlights in her long career. 

Asked some time ago to pick her favourite medal-winning performance, she cited the women’s 3x2.5 km relay open at Lillehammer 1994 stands out according to her.

"It is a tricky question because for me all of the medals have been the best," she said. 

"But if I had to choose, I would pick that relay."

Asked the same question by insidethegames, she nominated her biathlon win in the 7.5km sitski event at the 1998 Nagano Paralympics.

"That was really an OK one because our waxers had worked so hard with my skis," she replied. 

"But it’s hard to pick the best - they were all great in different ways I think."

Asked about her hardest-won medals, she did not hesitate.

"The hardest medals were in Salt Lake, maybe just because I felt it was not important in a way any more," she said. 

"So I had to work more with myself.

"I was motivated, but I changed my mind. 

"I felt, 'if you get number two or number three, well, it doesn’t really matter'. 

"Although still of course I wanted to win, and like for everyone you want to do something as good as you ever can do it. 

"That is normal.”

Well, yes. 

Up to a point. 

But the suggestion that 58 was a good age to be winning Paralympic golds prompted another of her wry retorts: "Maybe it says about other athletes, not about me."

Boom. What a woman.