Stacking gold upon gold as if such bullion were commonplace, Victoria Pendleton, leading the all-conquering Team GB as regally as her namesake, defended her world individual track cycling title at the Manchester Velodrome.

Supreme in her graceful style and astonishing power, she took her second gold of the championships, with another likely to come today.

Pendleton’s majestic win was followed by much more prolonged and tortuous heroics by Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish, who won the 50km Madison event, doing it the hard way.

That was gold medal No 8 for the British team; soon No 9 was secured when Chris Hoy won the men’s Keirin event with a devastating sprint for the line. By so doing, he became the first rider in history to win world gold in four different disciplines.

Pendleton needed only two of the best-of-three races that comprise the women’s sprint final to secure her latest success. In the first, she led her opponent, Simona Krupeckaite of Lithua-nia, from the start, with both women moving well and avoiding the tactical battles that usually mark the event.

At the bell Pendleton hit the pedals hard, but seemed to be in some danger down the back straight. Another burn did the trick.

In the second match, Pendleton won the other way. She allowed Krupeckaite to lead all the way before taking her around the final bend. “That pleased me,” she said. “If you can win both ways, it keeps opponents guessing.”

It was another triumph for Pendleton against personal uncertainty. “I doubt myself all the time,” she admitted.

“But at least I was confident with my form. I’ve proved that last year was not a one-off, that I have got the legs to beat the best in the world. Now I’m looking forward to the Olympics. It’s good to have established a psychological advantage over my opponents.”

Pendleton wrapped herself in the Union Flag and hugged her father, Max - her original inspiration - before addressing the nation. Such are the rewards for all the work that has enabled her to become the world’s best woman sprinter, by a good margin.

“My life seems quite dull. I ride around in circles,” Pendleton said once. Certainly there is plenty of grind and brain-numbing repetition on the track and in the gym. But Pendleton knows the joy of it as well.

As well as her place of triumph, the Manchester Velodrome is her place of work, Monday to Friday, two sessions a day. It is where she first experienced the thrill of riding the boards.

In 1996, aged 16, she was taken to the track for a tryout with Marshal Thomas, an assistant national coach. She felt “a huge, huge adrenaline rush” as she followed Thomas around at the top of the boards before plunging down for a flying lap.

For the spectator, there is certainly a surge when the cat-and-mouse prelude of match sprinting comes to an end and the violent action begins. How much more exciting it must be for the rider, plunging, swooping from high on the banking, hammering the pedals, from the speed of the London Eye to breakneck in a moment, hearing the alarm of the bell with a lap to go, then the crowd’s urgent roar, and giving all you have, death or glory in the eye-bulging dash to the line.

In world championships there are several sprint events, so Pendleton, clearly the world’s best, can collect medals by the fistful – she won three last year to open her account. At the Olympics, however, only the individual sprint is available. With its tactical component, and the risk that a false move could bring catastrophe, it is the most uncertain. “It sucks that the one event I am allowed to race in is the riskiest of them all,” Pendleton complained recently.

Nevertheless, and contrary to various misconceptions about her, Pendleton is admirably equipped for the task. She is petite and pretty enough to pose for magazines in everything from evening dress to undressed, but when it comes to competition, she is also as tough as old boots.

When the cheers finally die down, Britain can coolly be said to have four decent gold medal hopes for Beijing: Pendleton and Rebecca Romero; Wiggins and Hoy.

Wiggins, who took his third gold by winning yesterday’s Madison, has been just as impressive as Pendleton. At halfway in an event that is a pairs relay race involving 50km of mayhem, he and Cavendish were languishing in fifth place. To win, they had to make up a full lap on the field to gain a points bonus.

Wiggins is usually a silky-smooth rider, but now he rode with fury, carving his way through the other riders. Wiggins, like Cavendish a top-class road racer, played his part. So did the crowd.

“We had to go very hard to make up that lap,” Wiggins said. “We were on our knees. But you always have to remember that if it’s hurting, it’s hurting for everyone.”

Hoy is quite a different physical specimen from the slimline Pendleton and Wiggins. He is built like a bull. His power is obvious and he used it to full effect in the Keirin, in which the riders follow a motorcycle at increasing speed before being released to race the final 2½ laps. Hoy, who has had to switch events because the 1km trial is no longer in the Olympic programme, has quickly established mastery over his rivals.

How did all this come about? How did a nation that celebrated occasional success against the odds become the best in the sport, the new East Germany?

The older lags, such as Hoy, have seen the change. “You could not get a bigger contrast between my first world championship in 1996 and now,” he said recently. “When I first raced, you had your own bike and they just gave you a set of wheels. You weren’t even given any road jerseys or track-suits.

“I had to move home, so I could scrounge off my parents. It was family support that kept me going. Most other guys had full-time jobs. Two years before that, we didn’t even have the velodrome so we could only train properly when the weather was decent from April to September.”

Now it is all elite squads and lottery funding, so that every squad member can train full-time, and all the technical and coaching support that an athlete might desire. The progression of Pendleton is a good example. In 2001 she joined the England Potential Programme. In 2002 she was part of the World Class Performance Plan. Now she is in the Olympic Podium Plan.

No wonder that Arnaud Tournant, the legendary French track cyclist who is appearing in his final championships, says: “Great Britain is probably the only professional track team. The rest, including the French, the Dutch and so on, are amateur.”

Even in the glow of such extraordinary success, it has to be remembered that just before the championships began, Robert Hayles, one of Britain’s leading riders, failed a blood test and was suspended for two weeks pending further tests. The test he failed provides an indication but not proof that blood-boosting may have taken place.

For Wiggins, who has long been vociferous in his condemnation of drugs in his sport, it was especially unwelcome. Wiggins considered giving up the sport when his friend, Robert Millar, was banned for two years. He thought about it again last summer when his team leader in the Tour de France, Cristian Moreni, failed a dope test. Now Hayles, with whom Wiggins won a silver medal in the Madison event at the Athens Olympic, is under suspicion.

No doubt it is unjust to all those who have succeeded through their own efforts alone, but cycling remains a sport in which astonishing deeds are accompanied by an uncomfortable degree of scepticism.