Graphic: Great Britain cycling CV

Dominance is too poor a word. Britain established a complete hegemony over the cycling track at the Olympic Games in Beijing: ruthless, unforgiving, tyrannical. In sport you can actually measure the degree of dominance - that is part of sport’s point. Britain won seven of the ten gold medals available for track cycling.

British cyclists took eight gold medals in total - the extra one came on the road - and 14 medals of all colours. If British cycling was a country they’d have come eighth in the medals table, beating France, Italy and Japan. It was an astonishing achievement by any standards, but particularly when you consider that at the Atlanta Games of 1996, Britain didn’t win a single cycling medal and failed to enter many of the events.

I’ll tell you how they did it, if you like. They did it by means of team spirit and hard work. That’s how all winning teams do it. That’s also how all losing teams do it, at least at the beginning. It’s fair to assume, then, that the British cyclists had something else.

A culture of victory was established, one that enabled the cyclists to win six individual events with five different cyclists, plus two victories in team events. It helps to have truly exceptional athletes, but when they all succeed at the same time there is clearly a powerful force in common.

A team is a rum organisation in any walk of life. Some seek a team with almost desperate enthusiasm, certain that they will achieve more in company than alone; others do so with immense reluctance, turning to a team as a last-gasp ploy to reach an individual goal. Some live and die with the one-for-all glory of the team experience; others agree with the footballer Steve Archibald, who famously said that team spirit was an illusion glimpsed in victory.

In a sport such as cycling, the aims are diffuse. In traditional team sports such as cricket and football, it’s much clearer: when the team wins, everybody wins. The British cycling team in Beijing put up a united front in the search of separate and mainly individual goals.

It helps to have the hardware. By late 1997, cycling had lottery money for the first time, and a plan for the pursuit - cycling is very keen on pursuit - of excellence, for the pursuit, farfetched though it then seemed, of gold. Soon enough, they also had access to the Manchester Velodrome, which was built for the Commonwealth Games of 2002.

Those two things put an end to the traditional British practice of making-do and not complaining. No cyclist in the world had better opportunities to train. There were no more excuses. Amateurism died the death, and this cleared the decks and the minds. At a stroke, British cycling was - to put things at their most basic - in the business of turning cash into gold medals.

On, then, to the software. People. Teams need a leader, a focal point. David Brailsford is the performance director. He looks like a nightclub bouncer who has just won Mastermind: bullet-headed, uncompromising, with that little touch of Genghis Khan that helps to oil the wheels.

When you step just a little beyond the press conference persona, though, you find a committed democrat, a sharer, a team man.

The success of the British cycling team is about complementary skills, those shared by an inner ring of four, Brailsford included. Steve Peters, a psychiatrist, chairs the meetings and emphasises logic over emotional decisions. Shane Sutton, an Australian, connects with the riders as individuals. Chris Boardman, who won a gold medal for Britain in Barcelona, leads the technical side.

You can put together any team of good minds, and either it works or it doesn’t work. Sometimes difficulties and tensions enhance performance, sometimes like-mindedness is counter-productive. Such things are elusive, beyond prediction. Luck helps. Right at the heart of this success is a group of men who turned out to be four parts of a single genius. A bit like the Beatles; don’t ask which is Ringo.

Their single agenda has been excellence. Their shared understanding has been what Brailsford calls “the aggregation of marginal gains” - that is to say, take this new wheel nut, that adjustment in technique, plus an addition of fish oil to the diet, and it will add up to a measurable improvement. If the team has a slogan, it is “compassionate ruthlessness”, an oxymoron that combines the uncompromising manner in which sporting achievement is measured and the fallible nature of human athletes.

Rebecca Romero, who won a silver medal in rowing before winning a cycling gold in Beijing, said that the transition from one sport to another “was like going from school to university”.

There was success right from the start, but the extraordinary measure of this success came with the decision four years ago to train for “a medal or nothing”. The team decided that it was simply not interested in positions four to eight. With that in mind, they decided to train 23 athletes instead of 43 - but with the same money. The result of this decision was what we saw in Beijing.

This simplicity of thought, this focus on tangible rewards and nothing else, doesn’t please everyone. It has deprived us of plucky losers, sad thing for us British. On the track, Britain became rather unlovable: the East Germany de nos jours. “We never stop asking the question: ‘Will this get us a gold medal?’,” said Boardman.

Some might say that sport is about more than just winning, and so it is. But the first responsibility of anyone in elite sport is the pursuit of excellence. To be as good as you possibly can be. To fulfil your talents to the uttermost end. That is what the British cycling team have done, and it has been a wonder to behold. All that remains is the impossible - to follow that. “There is no template,” Boardman said. “The only template is constant changing.”