From the archive, the 1948 Olympic Games:

Men's cycling team pursuit I The opening ceremony I Review of the Games

To win an Olympic medal would represent the pinnacle achievement of many athletes' career and provide them with a memory to cherish long after they had retired from sport, but not Alan Geldard. Sitting in the living room of his home on the outskirts of Manchester, the former track cyclist still feels some frustration at having not won more more than bronze at the 1948 Games in London.

"We could have won gold and because of that I feel it in my bones," the 82-year-old says. "Maybe if you finish first, 20, 30 years later, you don't care. But when you came so close, it's different."

Geldard was a highly committed amateur cyclist and a student of his sport who coached youngsters until recently at the Manchester Velodrome. Yet the story of his Olympic year and the limitations he faced would make the world-leading members of Britain's current cycling team choke on their protein shake.

One of the first obstacles presented itself when he travelled down from Oldham a fortnight before the Games to join the squad of six that had been chosen to represent Britain in his event, a relatively complex discipline in which a quartet of riders take it in turns to set their pace while competing against opponents who start on the opposite side of the track.

Not surprisingly, Geldard assumed that the final couple of weeks would be spent fine-tuning tactics. Instead he found that the selectors had yet to decide on the fastest four and wanted the squad to stage a series of eliminators. "They made us race each other again and again," he says. "It was laughable really. Days before the event and I was cycling flat out against my team-mates."

He was also living with them, as well as with the rest of the British cycling squad in the house of a cycling journalist who lived near the Herne Hill Velodrome in South London, the Olympic venue and the site for their training. Staying there saved on travel costs and meant that the team did not have to haul their bikes from the official team digs on the other side of the city.

Geldard says they managed each other's company well but will admit it was hard to engender team spirit when some were still in competition for a place in the team. Still, a former national champion, Geldard eventually made the cut, reward for the evenings and weekends he spent competing or training alone once he finished his day job as a commercial artist.

It helped that Geldard had put together an excellent bike, having commissioned a specialist to build his frame before purchasing and applying the remaining components himself. In the aftermath of a World War that had blown a hole in the finances of almost all British industries, not least amateur cycling, none of the team were provided with equipment by the sport's governing body.

In fact, the only assistance they received in this regard was from Dunlop, which provided them with good-quality tyres, albeit on the condition they were returned after the Games. Rubber had been in short supply since the war.

A lack of money, however, could hardly excuse the decision to give Geldard and his colleagues team a top made from a mixture of wool and lisle that was designed to keep cyclists warm in cold conditions on the road rather than to make them aerodynamic on the track. Geldard keeps his in pristine condition in a wooden frame but is happy to remove it to demonstrate how inappropriate it was.

"Feel how thick that is," he says, laughing. "Cyclists from France and Italy were wearing silk and we got this. The British team were made to sweat."

Perhaps it was because he mistrusted the kit that Dave Ricketts, a team-mate of Geldard's, picked up a pair of shorts from a London dealer who took pity on the British team and offered them some accessories and kit for free. In a comical misjudgment, Ricketts raced in them for the first time in Britain's first-round tie against Canada and discovered they were far too small.

"They were almost a child's size!" Geldard says, laughing again. "He had to pull out after the first turn. It could have ruined everything." Fortunately for the British team, only three riders needed to finish the team pursuit and they did enough to win and set up a quarter-final against Denmark.

With Ricketts more suitably attired, they regrouped to win that race too and set up a showdown with France, the favourites to win gold. Here a lack of tactical preparation cost Britain dearly as the threat posed by the French made Wilf Waters set too fast a pace during the race, thus breaking up the British quartet in a set-back from which they did not recover.

That their campaign should have fallen short on such a simple mistake was made more difficult to bear when they produced a perfectly clean ride in the play-off for the bronze and won it in a quicker time than that in which France triumphed in the final. "That showed we could and should have won gold," Geldard says. "It's a tale of what might have been."

The disappointment did not end there, either. On his return to work a week later, Geldard found his employers were none too impressed by the exploits of their Olympic hero. Instead, given that he had taken off three weeks on half-pay to compete only shortly before he was due to go on his honeymoon, they decided he was no longer a suitably loyal employee and sacked him.

"A lot of Olympians then had similar experiences," he says, with no trace of bitterness at his former bosses. Perhaps he had used up all his disappointment missing out on gold.