Great Britain’s cyclists were thought to have reached their peak a year ago at the Track World Championships in Majorca, where they won seven gold medals. Yet they have humiliated all-comers over the past five days, winning gold in seven out of ten Olympic disciplines.

The worrying thought for their rivals is that, as Chris Hoy, the multiple world champion, says, there is still plenty of room for improvement. But David Brailsford, the Team GB performance director, is a pragmatist and, between the medal ceremonies, he was urging caution. “The chances of us replicating this in Beijing are slim,” he said.

Brailsford was reported last night as saying that he had considered resigning after Rob Hayles failed a blood test at the start of the championships. “I was going to quit,” he said. “For 24 hours I’d questioned my job. I didn’t want to be in a situation where, out of the blue, everything I’d worked for had just gone in a flash on the basis of what someone might or might not have done.”

Brailsford, however, decided to carry on and he is right to be cautious about Beijing. Part of that is down to the Olympic bias against women’s track racing. There is no women’s keirin in Beijing, no women’s team sprint and no women’s team pursuit; in Victoria Pendleton, Shanaze Reade and Rebecca Romero, Britain have the world champions in all three. Reade, who partnered Pendleton in the women’s team sprint last Thursday, will revert to her first love of BMX racing in pursuit of Olympic gold.

Wary of the growing expectations surrounding his squad, Brailsford refused to predict a medal tally in August. “We know what our target times are, there or thereabouts, because the parameters are very narrow.” he said. “What we don’t know is what our rivals will do in the Olympic environment, which is very different from this. It’s a question of who gets it right over the next four months.”

British riders hold the world title in the men’s sprint, the men’s keirin, the men’s individual and team pursuit, the madison, the women’s sprint and the women’s individual pursuit. Also on offer in Beijing are the men’s and women’s points races and the men’s team sprint, in which Team GB took the silver medal last Wednesday.

Away from the Olympic velodrome, Brailsford believes there are further opportunities, such as the challenge by Reade, the former world champion, in the Olympic BMX events and the hopes of Nicole Cooke and Emma Pooley in the women’s Olympic road race. Brailsford and his riders will not be lacking in motivation. “I’ll never forget the drubbing we took here from the Australians in the Commonwealth Games,” he said. “I thought, ‘How the hell are we going to overcome this massive machine?’ ”

Last Thursday night, when they struggled to take bronze in the team pursuit, the Australia squad lined up to applaud Team GB’s quartet as they came off the track after breaking the world record. Brailsford knows that the roles could be reversed in Beijing. “They’ll be back,” he said.