The first Great Britain gold of the Games yesterday was a great story — a great story because British Cycling thought it up more than a year ago. If you were watching Nicole Cooke at 10.30 yesterday morning, you might well have thought that she had blown it on that last bend, but no, even that bit was planned, too.

After 3½ hours of the road race yesterday and drenched from monumental rainstorms, Cooke and a group of four other riders completed the final, long descent of the race, swung right round the final significant bend to head into a last sprint, 450 metres of uphill leg-burn towards a finish set within the magnificent, misty, rolling backdrop of the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall of China.

All five went into that bend together, but when they emerged the other side, Cooke had dropped some 20 metres behind. It did, at that point, appear that her race was up, that her fifth place in Athens four years ago had been horribly re-run.

Yet Cooke’s power and gutsiness drew her level and then edged her past all four and in one of those blurred, scrambled finishes, she kept her back wheel ahead of Emma Johansson, of Sweden, to complete the masterplan.

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The reason that she had given away that 20-metre lead, it transpired afterwards, was because she was under orders to. Three kilometres from the finish, her instructions had been delivered through her earpiece from the team car, where Julian Winn, the team director, was nervous that the lightweight tyres that Cooke was using on the wet road could slip on that bend. There was also the chance that one of the other women might tumble and take Cooke down with her. So Cooke held back, stayed out of trouble and then backed her own talent to do the rest.

“It’s just so exciting,” she said afterwards. And so it should be when a good plan works, because the rest of the race had followed prescription, too.

Cooke is thus Britain’s first gold medal-winner, but it was Emma Pooley and Sharon Laws who helped her to get there. This was a victory that required Laws and Pooley, in particular, to sacrifice their own chances to improve Cooke’s. The way it was won, it should be called a team event.

Four years ago, Cooke had complained that her team-mates were not strong enough to allow her to compete for the medals. Yesterday was the opposite. The basic law of bike racing is that the riders at the front do the hard work and those behind tuck in, benefiting from the wind break. Yesterday, you regularly saw Laws and Pooley at the front. Until the final breakaway, Cooke was barely to be seen.

Laws was twice knocked from her bike when other riders crashed, but still returned to the fray. Pooley, meanwhile, led a series of mini-charges, thus forcing the peloton to chase her,with Cooke tucking in. With 23 kilometres to go, Pooley struck out again and the sudden daylight between herself and the peloton forced the Germans in particular to mount a pursuit,with Cooke again tucking in.

Pooley’s selflessness worked brilliantly. It hurt the opposition and it saved Cooke’s legs. With five kilometres to the finish, Pooley had effectively annihilated the chances of all but Cooke and the four other women in the final breakaway. Then it was just down to Cooke, who said afterwards that her priority on finishing was to share a team-mate hug.

As Winn said afterwards: “All three are world-class riders in their own right. But it was for the other two to create things for Nicole. The plan was to make the Germans chase. We took the stuffing out of them. Everything worked like clockwork.”

But it was far more than just a race plan. It began back in May 2007, when Cooke, her father, Tony, Winn and David Brailsford, the British Cycling performance director, met a group of other coaches to plan what they called Team Cooke.