School was out for a final day of the half-term holiday but for a while it seemed as though the children who packed into the Manchester Velodrome yesterday were being outnumbered by the British youngsters in Lycra competing in the UCI Track Cycling World Cup.

Not so much a world-class competition as a wipe-out by Great Britain’s riders, as they swept to victory in an astonishing 14 of 17 races.

Riders from the 30 other countries competing in this first important international event since the Olympic Games had already gained a taste of what they were in for in Beijing. But even they were shaken as they discovered that they were being beaten not by established stars but by a team of youngsters plucked from Team GB’s burgeoning cycling academy.

At times, it seemed as though the inner ring of the steep Manchester track was being used as a crèche by Dave Brailsford, the squad’s performance director.

Of the 16 medals won by the British team, half went to riders aged 20 or younger, an impressive statistic that will be worrying performance directors of rival teams around the world this morning.

It got to the stage that the British juniors being fed into this team were almost free-wheeling their way to victory. Jason Kenny even managed to win the men’s sprint event on his backside as he crashed on the finishing straight and slid the final few yards over the line.

Organisers were delighted, if only because the British riders helped their World Cup event to speed along on schedule: Britain’s 14-bar national anthem in slow waltz time is mercifully shorter than most from other nations.

There was, though, time last night for one more burst of the National Anthem at the end of the official World Cup races. Just to rub in Britain’s dominance, Matthew Crampton managed to do what the England cricket team failed to achieve in their Stanford Super Series by winning the exhibition money event — a men’s keirin with €15,000 (about £11,800) on offer to the winner. Quite an afternoon’s work for the 22-year-old, who earns about £24,000-a-year from lottery funding and sponsors as a junior member of the Britain squad.

Crampton’s cheque paled beside the mountain of gold against the British names on the list of World Cup winners: there were two golds and a silver for Kenny, 20, three golds for 19-year-old Elizabeth Armistead, which included victory in the team pursuit with Katie Colclough, 18, and Joanna Rowsell, 19, plus golds for Anna Blyth, 20, Jessica Varnish, 17, and David Daniell, 18. There was also gold for Wendy Houvenaghel and Chris Blyth; the men’s pursuit squad of Steven Burke, Robert Hayles, Geraint Thomas and Ed Clancy, who also won the individual pursuit title, and Jamie Staff, Ross Edgar plus Kenny in the men’s team sprint.

Then there was Victoria Pendleton, the undoubted star of the show but, at 28, almost the mother hen of this young brood. She took three emphatic victories to underline her point that she could have matched the three Olympic golds of Chris Hoy in Beijing, if only there had been events for her to race in.

“I am just so glad to have got through it,” she said. “I had no idea what condition I was in after Beijing. But I think I showed that women deserve more events for the London 2012 Games, particularly with all our youngsters coming through. They have been terrific, a real credit.”

Brailsford said: “The youngsters had to make sure they didn’t get emotionally hijacked by the whole situation.” He need not have worried. Britain’s gilded youth did him proud.

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