The gold medals came thick and fast last night at the Manchester Velodrome as Great Britain’s track cyclists roared back to their best form in the World Championships. The men’s pursuit team, with a world-record time, defended their title and, immediately afterwards, Rebecca Romero, the former Olympic rower, struck gold in the women’s individual pursuit.

There was barely time to catch breath before Team GB claimed their third gold of the evening and their fourth of the championships, when Victoria Pendleton and Shanaze Reade, 19, won the women’s team sprint for the second year running.

If the men’s pursuit team’s success had an air of déjà vu about it, it was Romero’s unstoppable victory against Sarah Hammer, the outgoing world pursuit champion from the United States, that raised the velodrome roof.

Romero, who began cycling only two years ago, is an intense performer. Her qualifying ride yesterday afternoon set a British record and left her retching at trackside, with what David Brailsford, the Team GB performance director, tactfully labelled a “pursuiter’s cough”.

“It’s two years to the day since I came here and got on a bike,” Romero said of her rapid progression. “I wanted it so badly, even if at one point I didn’t think it was going to happen. I still had to have the belief that I could do it and I have, so I am ecstatic.”

Romero received a rapturous reception from the Manchester crowd. “I think they made it, to be honest,” she said. “I have experienced nothing like that. It gave me the edge against Sarah Hammer, who’s a class act.”

If Romero, 28, continues to race with this level of intensity, her ambition of following her Olympic silver medal in rowing, at Athens in 2004, with a cycling medal in Beijing this summer, is within reach. “I’m a sore loser,” Romero, who finished second to Hammer in the women’s pursuit last year in Majorca, said. “Gold is the only medal I am interested in.”

“Rebecca is an awesome individual,” Brailsford said. “She’s full-on in terms of her athletic performance. She’s intense and she’s motivated, but behind that there’s also a really nice person.”

As Romero saluted the crowd, Bradley Wiggins was celebrating his second gold medal in less than 24 hours. “Regardless of the times, it was just a case of winning,” Wiggins, who had his arms aloft in celebration even before crossing the finishing line, said. “There were three of them ahead of me and they stopped the clock, so it felt a huge relief.”

Despite strong opposition from Denmark, whose quartet of pursuiters had set the fastest qualifying time, Wiggins, winner of the men’s individual pursuit on Wednesday night, and his team-mates, Geraint Thomas, Ed Clancy and Paul Manning, were never threatened by defeat.

Their world-record performance swept away any niggling doubts over a loss of form and the fear that the withdrawal from the championships of their team-mate, Rob Hayles, over a failed UCI blood test, might have been playing on their minds.

“Yesterday and today, I’ve been on the back foot going into the final,” Wiggins said. “It’s nice to come out like that and do the job. To share it with the boys is great. When you win with a group that you spend so many hours training with and finish it all off with a time like that, it makes it worthwhile.”

Brailsford was delighted by last night’s shower of gold medals, but the Britain coach would be the first to guard against complacency with the Olympic Games looming on the horizon. “People say, ‘You got seven golds at the last World Championships — how many will you get this year?’ But you can’t keep winning by three or four seconds all the time. You can’t expect that to carry on,” he said.

“It’s a good thing for us to be pushed hard before Beijing. You look at the course, you look at the venues, you look at the pollution. But the biggest issue we had prior to the Olympics was complacency. When you win comfortably as we did at last year’s Worlds in Majorca, you might stop doing the things that got you there in the first place.”

To judge from their performances in the first two days of these World Championships, there is little risk of Britain losing the winning habit. More medals are possible, with Chris Hoy having disposed of Theo Bos, the world champion from the Netherlands, in the men’s sprint heats and Pendleton targeting the women’s sprint and keirin.

Even Romero will have high hopes of a second medal in today’s women’s team pursuit, a new event in the World Championships.

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