LOADS of people (OK, a moderate amount of people, like about four) have asked me if I’ll feel a sense of relief or elation if I’m named when the British cycling team for Rio is announced.

Since I – like most things in this world – am deeply unoriginal, I’ve come up with a cheesy set line that I give in reply.

“Well I currently train in a team of five, and five riders will fly out to Rio, so no prizes for guessing that announcement. However, not all five of us will necessarily ride, so really for us (here comes my line) it’s not about getting on the plane, it’s about getting on the start line.”

Goosebumps, right? No? Maybe if I fill you in on the workings of Olympic team pursuit it’ll make sense.

The way you win a gold is by making it to the final and then by going faster over four kilometres than the other team. There’s no gold medal for simply setting the fastest time of the day, you need to back it up. Four riders start but the clock is stopped on the third rider, so only three need to finish. If you catch the other team on the track before the distance is up, you beat them.

The top eight teams will ride three times over the event. First is qualifying, on Thursday, August 11, where each team ride by themselves to set a time and these times are used to rank the teams for the next stage.

In round one, on the morning of Saturday, August 13, you want to qualify fastest because the fastest qualifier goes against fourth fastest and second fastest goes against third fastest. The winners of each of these races goes through to the gold medal final in the evening.

There are also races between the fifth to eighth qualifiers. The fastest times set by the teams ranked third to eighth will then secure passage to the bronze medal ride.

Now you know all that, I can explain the selection process. It’s possible that five people will ride if we make line-up changes throughout the event. It’s even likely, if we have a team of strong riders that are almost indistinguishable. This would be beneficial because it could mean we have a slightly fresher team for the final (five hours after round one), with a rider that’s spent the morning “on the bench”, so to speak, coming in.

If that happened, we would all have earned whatever our final result was as a team. However, it’s hard to deny that selection for the final seems to hold a majestic importance. Medals can be lost in either of the two rounds previous, but they are won in a final.

Alternatively, our fifth rider could simply act as a reserve. This is a bit of an emotionally confusing role because you have to pretend that you are about to race at an Olympic Games, just in case you are. That means right up until an hour before each ride (when the cut-off for naming the team comes), you are trying to get into the right mental and physical state for what could be the biggest race of your career, though it probably won’t be.

So I wasn’t lying: it’s really not about getting on the plane. Although I heard the flights are in business class, so maybe it is a little bit. But the finer details of selection for us don’t have an announcement date, so I doubt I will feel great relief or elation if I get a good-news phone call from head coach Iain Dyer.

A bad-news phone call, however, now that could really kick-start some emotion. We’ll just have to wait and see – although I do promise to tweet before thinking if it’s the latter.

The announcement of the cycling team for Rio comes on Friday, if you’re wondering. I hope to be selected for the women’s team pursuit team alongside my current team-mates Elinor Barker, Joanna Rowsell-Shand, Ciara Horne and Laura Trott.

The cycling team for the Paralympics has already been announced and includes my road team team-mate Dame Sarah Storey. Rio will be her seventh Games after attending and winning a medal at every one since Barcelona in 1992, which is, quite frankly, outrageously impressive.

Sarah once told me she considered retiring aged 19, which I’ve never believed. There’s no way anything’s ever going to stop her.

Hopefully, Rio will be my first Olympics but I’m not going to dwell on trying to follow Sarah’s standard. I’m losing enough sleep as it is thinking about selection for this one.