IT is just 301 days until the Rio Olympics. The next 10 months will pass inordinately quickly for the British athletes and with Team GB having finished in third position in the medal table at London 2012, expectations for next summer are high. It is unlikely that Britain will surpass the 65 medals won in London three years ago but a significant drop-off would be perceived as something of a failure.

If Team GB is to get within touching distance of the medal total achieved in London then it is the cyclists who will have to perform particularly well. At both Beijing 2008 and London 2012, the cycling team led the way, bringing home most medals for Britain at both Games and it was those on the track who were particularly impressive. Team GB’s track cyclists won 12 medals in Beijing, seven of which were gold, and followed that up with nine medals in London including another seven gold. GB was, by a country mile, the most successful nation in the velodrome. The build-up for Rio is already in full flow but the real indicators of how the British cyclists are likely to perform begin now.

The European Track Cycling Championships take place in Grenchen, Switzerland from Wednesday and the British team need to begin showing some good form if they are to get to Rio in medal-winning mode. British Cycling has been so utterly dominant at the last two Olympic Games that there is something of an assumption that this incredible success will continue but the signs during the run up to next summer's Games contradict this significantly; the British cycling squad’s dominance was not previously confined to the Olympic Games – they also put in strong performances at World and European Championships but this four-year cycle has proved to be very different.

The 2014 World Championships was the British track cycling team’s worst performance since the advent of Lottery funding 16 years previously with the men performing particularly poorly, returning home empty-handed. Shane Sutton, the GB head coach, said that his riders needed “to take a good look at themselves”. The 2015 World Championships earlier this year was only slightly better with GB winning just three silver medals; it was the first time that they have failed to win a world gold since 2001. GB finished a lowly tenth in the medal table. Now, with less than a year until Rio, performances must improve if they are to emulate their successes of the previous two Olympic Games but is this likely?

The GB team is, in many ways, a victim of its own success. Its complete and utter dominance in Beijing and London was unprecedented and so to expect this dominance to continue ad infinitum is unrealistic, to say the least. Yet the drop-off of the Brits performances in this Olympic cycle has been quite staggering.

There are a few reasons for this; the most obvious being that both Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton retired in the aftermath of London leaving the British team without two of their stalwarts. Hoy and Pendleton were as close to medal guarantees as you are likely to get in sport. Laura Trott has replaced Pendleton and consistently delivers medals but a replacement for Hoy has been harder to find. Although perhaps this is being unfair, is it realistic to expect a six-time Olympic champion to be replaceable? It appeared that Jason Kenny, gold medallist in 2008 and 2012, would fill Hoy’s shoes almost seamlessly but his form in recent seasons has been shaky, to say the least. At the 2015 World Championships, the Englishman was eliminated in the first round of the men’s sprint, the event in which he is world champion. Another worrying statistic from the 2015 World Championships is that the women’s team pursuit squad, which included Scot, Katie Archibald and who had been world champions in the event since 2011, lost their world title to Australia.

The departure of supremo, Dave Brailsford, from British Cycling in April 2014 to Team Sky has not helped the track team’s cause either; it was clear that the 51-year-old was able to manage the programme almost to perfection to ensure that he enabled his riders to perform to the best of their abilities. Another significant issue for the British riders however, is that the other nations are closing the gap quite considerably; Australia, France, Colombia along with others now have riders who are capable of defeating the Brits.

The British Cycling team has lost its aura; no longer do other nation’s riders feel defeated before they even line up against a Brit. Ten months may not be long enough to build a feeling of invincibility to take into Rio but it is certainly enough time to regain the winning mentality that took the British riders to so many medals in Beijing and London. Their first chance to lay the initial bricks comes next week at the European Championships and if the British riders' form improves, don’t put it past them to dominate the Olympic podium again next year.