Nobody in the British cycling team is liable to be carried away by the glut of medals hauled in over this World Cup weekend in Manchester. Complacency and open-top bus rides are not much encouraged here. But the rippling confidence of the squad, epitomised by Bradley Wiggins and Chris Hoy, their golden Olympians, still augured well for the more testing challenges ahead.

Wiggins and Hoy won gold medals on the opening day of the championships and both were set to double their tally, in the team pursuit and the sprint respectively, last night on their home track. Britain’s pursuit quartet — Ed Clancy, Rob Hayles, Paul Manning and Wiggins — broke the magical four-minute mark yesterday afternoon to set a British record. And that was just in qualifying. Vickie Pendleton added a gold in the 500m time trial to the sprint gold she won with such panache on Friday evening.

With the track cycling world championships being held next month in Mallorca, the concluding World Cup event of the track season has taken on an extra significance. There is not much time left to recover form. Beijing is firmly on the horizon and fewer than 2,000 breast-beating days remain to the opening of the London Olympics. The sports that have not kept their house in order are already starting to panic. Cycling , along with sailing and rowing the staple providers of Olympic medals,is not one of them.

The striking aspect of the three-day meeting at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester this weekend was not the virtuosity of Hoy, the Olympic kilo champion, or the casually brilliant return to the track of Bradley Wiggins, triple medallist in Athens who was riding on the track for the first time since the Games, but the performances of a new generation who will form the heart of the team for London in five years from now.

Take Anna Blyth, an 18-year-old sprinter fresh out of school, one of an impressive list of British junior world champions, headed by Jason Kenny, a triple world champion. Blyth was beaten in Friday night’s semi-final bronze medal ride-off by the highly experienced Australian, Anna Meares, but was by no means overawed by the experience of her first World Cup series. “To reach that level of performance at that stage,” enthused Dave Brailsford, the inspirational head of the British squad, “is so encouraging for the future.”

Moments later Pendleton , the 2005 world sprint champion, confirmed the well-being of the frontline medal hopes for Beijing by annihilating Shuang Guo, the Chinese rider, in the sprint finals.

Pendleton had threatened to give up the sport in the aftermath of hera depressing defeat in Athens, but was quickly persuaded back to the track by the overwhelming confidence of the community around her. “Success breeds success,” says Chris Boardman, now director of coaching and a man who should know. “It’s a fantastic environment for them. Success is the norm.”

Four medals at each of the past two Olympics, including three golds, an estimated 50 medals in major championships, senior and junior, and counting. Cycling has set the standard for the whole of British sport.

Pendleton’s ambitions had initially been kindled by watching Chris Newton and ChrisHoy win titlesat the 2001 world championships. The progress of Jason Queally from laboratory technician to Olympic champion prompted a similar “if you can do it, I can do it” mentality amongst his peers. It helps, too, that the velodrome here encourages a refreshing sense of democracy, with 2 pound a sessionjuniors rubbing shoulders with world and Olympic champions.

“This is a facility for the elite, but it’s also a community facility,” says Johnarl Walsh, who has run the Manchester velodrome for the past 12 years. “In the early days we were an easy target, a white elephant and all that, but the perception changed with Jason Queally. He’d started out in a ‘taster’ session with us and went on to become Olympic champion. Now we’re the busiest velodrome in the world, open 9am to 10pm every day, and kids coming off the street have just as much right to use the track s Olympic medallists.”

A unique perspective on cycling’s strengths is provided by Rebecca Romero, a product of another highly successful world class performance programme. Romero, a world champion and Olympic silver medallist in the women’s quad, switched from rowing to cycling in the aftermath of Athens. In part, she was bored by the constant and monotonous demands of a team sport, in part disillusioned by the top down management of the rowing squad.

“One of the attractions was that this was a very individual sport,” she said yesterday after qualifying second to Wendy Houvenhagel, a former RAF dentist, for last night’s final of the individual pursuit. “Both rowing and cycling are successful programmes, but they treat the athletes in very different ways. In cycling, there’s a smaller number of athletes and they allow the athletes to take responsibility for their jobs. When you’re on the start line at the Olympics, you want to know that you’ve done everything possible to extract every last fraction of a per cent and I didn’t honestly think that I could say that in rowing. I can here.”

Given that rowing has been the most productive Olympic sport for two decades, that is a telling, if contentious claim. Quite apart from her remarkably swift progress on the track, Romero has absorbed the culture and the language of her new sport with equal ease.

Principle number one in the GB cycling squad: there is no stick, just carrot. “You don’t whip anyone on to the podium,” says Brailsford. “You have to believe that every rider will give 100%, per cent,not for us, but for themselves. And you’re not just looking at the sporting side, you get the best out of riders who are happy and well balanced in the rest of their lives.”

Principle number two, taken from the Chris Boardman book of medal-winning: work on logic, not emotion. “Emotion can make you do silly things,” explains Brailsford.

On the Olympic start line in Barcelona in 1992, where the whole evolution of British cycling began, Boardman took comfort from the knowledge that in terms of preparation and technology, he could have done no more. Now he is being employed to instil the same clinical efficiency into the whole coaching system. But the real stroke of genius is that Boardman, a techno-wizard, has also been put in charge of British cycling’s research and development.

“It sounds a bit corny, but we’re limited only by our own imagination,” says the former Olympic champion. With funding from UK Sport, Formula One aerodynamicists, mathematicians, swimsuit designers and manufacturers, paint specialists, all have been recruited to help Britain’s cyclists go quicker at the next Olympics.

“We’re talking big chunks of time here,” Boardman adds. “I’d say we’re seven or eight years ahead of our rivals already.” The trick will be to keep it that way until 2012.

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