Rebecca Romero is as blunt as she is determined. She quit sculling for indoor track racing “to find a better vehicle to help me win gold”. As she hoped, that vehicle turned out to be the remorseless British cycling team, transplanted from Manchester to Beijing with every last technician and spare carbon fibre spoke.

This team has the use of a state-of-the-art velodrome built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. It also received more than £22 million in Lottery funding for the Beijing Games, nearly three times its grant for Athens in 2004. Thanks to the medals haul of which Ms Romero's is a part, the team will now bid from a position of unrivalled strength for its share of the £400 million pledged by Government for elite sports funding between now and 2012, and for the £100 million that Gordon Brown still hopes to raise from the private sector.

This may seem unfair on sports in which Britain has not excelled in this Olympiad. Some will claim it is especially unfair since cycling, along with sailing and rowing - Team GB's other Beijing success stories - are somehow “middle class sports”. The label is largely meaningless. Even if it were not, there is nothing wrong with middle class sports. But the more important point is that allowing elite sports funding to follow the best results in the hope that excellence breeds more excellence is exactly the right approach, and one to which sports chiefs would be wise to stick as the clamour for money grows over the next four years.

“Winning is everything,” Damon Hill once said. That underplayed the role of participation but is still hard to beat as a top athlete's mantra. And the best time for a rigorous analysis of how winning is achieved is during a winning streak.

Three findings of such an analysis are already clear. First, it is professionalism, more than money, that accounts for the British cycling team's extraordinary medal tally. The rowing and athletics teams each received more Lottery funding. The sailing team received nearly as much. But as Ms Romero herself attested from personal experience, the cycling operation “is a world apart”. Other teams may have envied its equipment, but they envied its conviction more.

This being so, it is right for UK Sport, the body that allocates Lottery money to elite sports programmes, to play to the UK's existing strengths. If money alone cannot buy medals, it is likely to be wasted when lavished on sports (like handball, taekwondo and volleyball, which received nearly £10 million between them for 2008) in which no winning tradition has been established.

Finally, such traditions are usually established by individuals, not grants. True talent and self- belief will always shine through. Rebecca Adlington proved the point when she let on that she received less than a third as much in public funds for training as her Australian and US rivals. Louis Smith has made the same point with less fanfare. Who knew that a Briton could win an individual medal in gymnastics?

It is not Government's role to manufacture mass enthusiasm for sport, desirable as that would be as an outcome of the Beijing gold rush and the build-up to London 2012. Public funds for elite training are necessarily finite and should be targeted without apology at winning medals. There is no better recipe for inspiration.