Samuel Sanchez of Spain, the winner of the Olympic men's road race, wasn't the only rider left red-eyed after today's gruelling 245-kilometre race from the centre of Beijing to the foot of the Great Wall of China.

While Sanchez was moved to tears by his victory, claiming that “Spanish sport is living its golden era right now,” others were left spluttering by the brutal conditions. The question now is whether the thick air hovering over the Beijing basin will hamper Nicole Cooke's hopes of Olympic gold.

“You can’t breathe,” Stefan Schumacher of Germany, winner of two stages in last month's Tour de France, said after the men's road race. “It feels like you are at three thousand metres because of the air. It’s not funny any more.”

As Australian rider Stuart O'Grady complained of a "pounding headache," Jason McCartney of the United States said: “I’ve raced all over central and south America and I’ve seen a lot of nasty pollution. My throat’s a little scratchy, but everybody has to deal with the same thing.”

Team GB's four man team also found the conditions difficult to cope with. “It’s totally different to being in Europe,” GB team captain Roger Hammond said. “There, it’s a pain in the legs. Here, it’s the breathing and the heat.”

Hammond's GB team mate Steve Cummings agreed. “I just didn’t adapt well to the time difference, the conditions and the climate. We were on the limit all day,” he said. “Some people cope with it and I didn’t.”

Such comments will cast a shadow over the high hopes that Team GB have for tomorrow's women's road race, in Cooke, Emma Pooley and Sharon Laws are expected to challenge for medals. But Team GB performance director David Brailsford does not believe that Beijing's unique conditions will have a detrimental impact on their chances of success.

“It was ten degrees hotter in Beijing at the start of the men’s road race than it had been in training, so that made it very difficult,” he said. “To be honest, in terms of the result, we got what we expected. We have done everything right in terms of preparation so I’m not concerned that the conditions will be more of a problem than anticipated.”

Although some riders, notably the smog-mask-sporting American cyclist Jennie Reed, have claimed that there is even smog in the Olympic velodrome, Brailsford disagrees. “There is some dust in the velodrome,” he said, “but it’s not smog — it’s more like building dust. I don’t think it will have any impact on performance.”