“Two Games, equal splendour” is what the Beijing organisers promised and are delivering, and already the same can be said of the Great Britain cycling team after the first day of competition at the Paralympic Games. It was business as usual at the Laoshan Velodrome where Britain continued their golden run yesterday by winning three golds on the track.

Britain won seven out of ten golds at the velodrome in the Olympics and took that to ten out of a possible 13 yesterday. Australia won the last two finals of the day, but only in events in which Britain were not fielding riders.

The margin of victory for the British riders in the Paralympics, all of whom set world records during the day, revealed an almost embarrassing dominance, typified by Darren Kenny's performance in the three-kilometere pursuit. Kenny overtook Jin Yong Sik, his South Korean rival in the final, one kilometre into the race. Kenny had smashed his own world record by six seconds in the morning, with a time of 3min 36.875sec. Given his hectic schedule in chasing five golds, he was not unduly sorry to have missed out on the chance to better his time.

The Britain Paralympic cycling team are integrated with the Olympic team, from the training to the bikes to the kit they wear. The disability squad members are not wholly based in Manchester, but they go to the velodrome there for the “performance” sessions and you may find juniors and disabled riders, and podium (Olympic) programme riders, inspiring each other and coaches sharing ideas.

The two teams are one, with the same coaches, fitness advisers, mechanics and now achieving the same results. “Everybody here is capable of winning gold, that's the standard to get on to the team at the moment,” Kenny said. “We've left people behind who were capable of winning medals because of the number of spaces allocated.”

The Paralympic team have already been subjected to the same level of scrutiny as their Olympic counterparts, with other nations photographing their equipment. Much of it is identical to the Olympic bikes, but there have been some innovations. Sarah Storey, who was born with a partially formed left hand, for example, has unique handlebars, with a ring to put her arm into.

“You'll recognise a lot of the equipment from the Olympic Games because it's exactly the same,” Helen Mortimer, the Paralympic team manager, said. “Chris Boardman [director of research and development for the British track cycling team] heads that and has done a lot of work with the mechanics to ensure that a lot of the equipment we've developed meets the IPC [International Paralympic Committee] guidelines. We've done a lot of work on the tandems and handbikes, and tricycle as well. There have been a few adaptations with how they're able to hold bars. We've done new a bar for Sarah Storey, which has a circle for her hand, but the other two thirds of the bar are exactly the same as for Bradley Wiggins [Britain's double Olympic gold medal-winner].

“If you look at some of the equipment that others are using, even the top nations, they are so far behind where we are. There has been a lot of interest. People have been coming over taking photos, chatting to the mechanics. It's out there now, we've got other ideas in the back of our minds.”

The work of the past eight years is bearing fruit. Paralympic cycling received no funding for Sydney 2000, £516,000 for the four years to Athens 2004 and £1,761,400, one of the biggest jumps for any sport, for Beijing. If Sydney was the breakthrough Olympics for the British cyclists, Athens was the same for the Paralympians. Having never won a Paralympic cycling gold, they took three courtesy of Kenny, who won two, and Aileen McGlynn and Ellen Hunter, her pilot from Wales, who won the women's one-kilometre tandem time-trial, as they did again yesterday.

McGlynn, 35 from Paisley, near Glasgow, is partially sighted and was inspired to try out for the Paralympic team after seeing Chris Hoy winning gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester and she has followed in his footsteps.

“You've just got to go out and do the training, and if you've done the training there is no need to worry about the pressure,” McGlynn said. “The guys at British Cycling have just produced a fantastic bike, stiffer, lighter, more aerodynamic,” Hunter said of their tandem.

The surprise of the day was Simon Richardson, a 41-year-old father of two from Porthcawl, who won the men's one-kilometre time-trial in a world record of 1min 14.936sec to become Britain's first medal-winner of the Games. “It's a real shock,” he said. “We didn't come for the kilometre, it's just a bonus. It was a warm-up for the three-kilometre race.”

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