Shanaze Reade, self-confessed cycling rebel, believes she is getting softer in her old age. She’s 19 now and tends to do what she’s told, which was not always the way for the “badass chick who kicks guys”, as her website used to have it. The website is being redesigned and so, glinting stud in top lip notwithstanding, is Reade herself.

She is still a BMX rider from the top of her aerodynamic helmet to the clips on her cycling shoes, but the track, with its Lycra and its bookful of rules, is less daunting now than when she first began to pedal in the backstreets of Crewe nearly a decade ago. In Beijing she will be a strong favourite to win gold in the inaugural Olympic BMX event; this week, at the world championships in Manchester, she will don her Great Britain skinsuit and aim to defend her team sprint title with Victoria Pendleton while taking a tilt at the 500m time trial. Track or BMX? “It’s all pedalling, isn’t it?” If the organisers of London 2012 have sense they will include both those track events in the programme, keep BMX and give Reade a chance to be the face of the Games. Reade would bask in it. “I like the media side of things,” she says. “I want the public to know my story because I didn’t have the best of upbringings and that might inspire a few kids.”

The story of Shanaze begins in Crewe, a town best known for being on the way to somewhere else. Shanaze’s mother, Joanna, was 17 when her daughter was born. Her Jamaican father, Lincoln, did not stay long after the birth and the little girl was brought up at first by her grand-parents, Mick and Mary Reade, who lived across the street, just round the corner from an aunt and uncle. “My cousins cycled at the local track and I went down there when I was about 10,” she explains. “I hired a BMX bike for £1 and had a go.” There she met Bob Field, a Rasta with a big hat, known as Black Bob, whose son raced. Bob died recently of cancer. At the funeral the family played the video diary Bob made over his last year. “Shanaze,” came a familiar voice, “I want you to win the Olympics for me. I’ll be watching.”

“The funeral was very emotional,” Reade says. “I was quite touched by it, and inspired. Bob was a character. He got the BMX track going in Crewe, he funded it, got sponsorship, everything. ‘Yo gang,’ he’d say. He had a big Afro, you couldn’t miss him.

“People would come from Derby, even from as far as Bournemouth, for club nights and Bob would put his car headlights on for floodlights and really get the atmosphere going. He had a heart attack once and drove himself to the hospital. If I’m having a bad day, I think of Black Bob.”

Had British sport more Black Bobs, gold medals would not be such an issue. But Reade’s sunny temperament and resolutely Thatcherite creed has been equally vital to her success in BMX where she is a double world champion and now in her fledgling track career. “I watch these programmes sometimes where people are saying, ‘Oh my dad wasn’t around, I’m from a one-parent family and that’s why I ended up on drugs’. It’s just an excuse. People are lazy, they want things on a plate but life’s not like that. You have to work for it and I’ve worked for it.”

Reade was unable to afford all the fancy equipment she needed or get to all the major international events. The local police station had a whipround for her trip to the first junior world championships; she grabbed lifts where she could and trained on her own, showing such explosive natural power that the kid from nowhere began to dominate the increasingly professional ranks of BMX riding.

The epiphany came in the summer of 2003. Reade had just chosen her GCSEs, unsure if a career in BMX was realistic. “My coach [Jeremy Hayes] rang to say BMX had been introduced to the Olympics for Beijing,” Reade says. “That was it. I’d wanted to be an English teacher but you can go back to college, you can’t go back to being an Olympic gold medallist.”

Joining the track programme, in BMX’s off-season, has been an eye-opener for Reade and the British squad. “When I was younger, I thought track was way too harsh on kids, way too structured, no fun,” Reade admits. “You can’t just go along to the cycle shop and buy a track bike, but you can get a BMX bike. People are blinded by the belief that it’s a kids sport, but it’ll do really well at the Olympics. At least you know who wins, not like the Madison.”

To their credit, British Cycling have not tried to smooth too many of the rough edges. In return, Reade has blown like a fresh breeze through a sport of imposing seriousness. After six weeks training, she partnered Pendleton to the world title in the team sprint in Mallorca, demolishing any lingering scepticism. “I’ve never been a great believer in innate talent,” says Chris Boardman, head of development for British Cycling’s elite programme. “But if there is such a thing, it’s Shanaze. She’s very passionate, very volatile, very strong-minded, all the things that make you good, and she knows she’s her own worst enemy. But it’s worked well.”

Reade, with a touching naivete, maps out her coming year, beginning with a gold in the team sprint this week and another medal in the time trial, followed by racing in America, a third world BMX title and then, finally, Olympic gold. Then she thinks she might take a year off to go travelling. “I like to have a life outside sport and I’m growing up a bit,” she says. “If someone says something these days I tend to say, ‘Yes’ when I used to say, ‘No, I can’t cope with this’. I want to get everything I possibly can out of myself, so I say to myself, ‘Come on, Shanaze, you’ve got to do that’. I’ve never had such a massive event to aim for.”

The journey from Crewe to Beijing has taken some pedalling already.

Track cycling world championships, Wednesday, BBC2, 7pm, continues throughout the week

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