Rebecca Romero has switched disciplines before to notably good effect, winning an Olympic silver medal in rowing before a gold in track cycling, so to do it again should be no sweat for one of Britain’s fiercest competitors.

It would just be the ultimate irony if her proposed change to the road time-trial for London 2012 is forced by the quest for greater gender equality in elite sport. The 29-year-old has rarely been one of the girls, preferring the controlled isolation of individual effort to the vagaries of teamwork.

After fulfilling her mission to become an Olympic champion in Beijing last year, it was not she but Victoria Pendleton who decried the lack of opportunity in track cycling for women to emulate Sir Chris Hoy’s triple gold medal-winning heroics.

So while Pendleton relishes the opportunity of going for three gold medals in 2012, as the IOC prepares to equalise the number of events open to men and women, Romero will be left without a title to defend if the three-kilometres individual pursuit is cut.

Bradley Wiggins, whose four-kilometres individual pursuit event — in which he won gold last year — is also under review, has warned that the changes would spell the death of endurance cycling in the velodrome. Romero may already have written its epitaph. Along with Wendy Houvenaghel, runner-up to Romero in Beijing, she was among the non- starters yesterday at the British National Track Championships, despite being named among the entrants. She is also expected to be absent from the first round of the Track World Cup, which also takes place in the Manchester Velodrome, at the end of the month.

Dan Hunt, her coach, who oversees British Cycling’s endurance riders, said Romero was primed for another challenge of talent transfer. “It’s almost like she’s going to have to reinvent herself as an athlete to be competitive in the time-trial at the highest level,” he said. “My take with Rebecca is, if she turns her mind to something and commits 100 per cent to it, there’s a fair degree of likelihood that she’ll achieve what she sets out to.

“The one thing she is motivated by is individual [events]. She likes the events where she is totally in control of how she does, not necessarily relying on other people.”

For a power athlete, the relatively flat time-trial course in London would suit her physical attributes as well as her temperament. “There’s no real reason on a physical level, on a technical level why she can’t succeed in the time-trial, it’s just going to involve a massive body of work,” Hunt said.

However, he refused to rule out Romero’s involvement in the team pursuit, an event in which she did, after all, help Britain to win the world title last year. “We don’t ever want to write Becs out of the track programme,” he said.