Shortly before 4.30pm Paris time, as the last notes of God Save the King were dying away, a mechanic called Rune Kristensen was wheeling the most prized artefact in British cycling back to its truck. The Pinarello bike ridden by Tom Pidcock to Olympic gold was still coated in a fine layer of warm dust, the No 1 mounted on its front, its gears still on the same setting. On the stem, in red, white and blue, was emblazoned Pidcock’s personal motto: “Play your cards right.”

This is a sport where the odds can swivel in an instant, where nothing is ever won and so no cause is ever truly lost. Pidcock, a rider who has made a career out of doing the undoable, knows that better than most. Here he was dealt the most unpromising of hands, and against a hostile home crowd and a flat tyre, he cleaned out the house.

Related: ‘It’s bigger than cycling’: Tom Pidcock defies puncture to claim Olympic gold

It was a ride of pure, thrilling instinct: a welcome reminder that in the chaos of competitive cross-country biking, sometimes the best plan is no plan at all. And Pidcock, who has won on the snow-flecked peaks of Alpe d’Huez and the dandruff-white roads of Strade Bianche and now the verdant woodland of Paris, is in many ways a cyclist of the romantic imagination, of a time before strategies and specialisation and four‑year plans, when the essence of the sport was simply to get on your bike and thrash the hell out of it.

Specialisation will surely come for Pidcock too in the end. With a second gold safely in the bag, and with his peak years approaching, all the incentives seem to point towards a proper tilt at the Tour with Ineos Grenadiers, the laborious process of chiselling and sanding himself down into a pure mountain machine. But here, amid the tree stumps and the dirt, is where his bold and breathtaking range of skills finds its most vivid and spectacular expression.

Of course, Elancourt Hill – an hour out of Paris on the site of a former landfill quarry – is nobody’s idea of a classic mountain bike course. Rather, as Pidcock tersely put it last week, it is what you get when you “just gravel over a nice hillside”. For all this, it offers divine views of the city and about as visceral a spectator experience as it is possible to imagine. They were clambering up the hill and staking out their spots from early morning, defying the cloying heat, lining the long ragged ribbons, relishing perhaps the rare opportunity to have an Olympic athlete whizzing four inches past your nose.

For a time it was possible to envisage this race as an elongated procession, Pidcock simply stringing out the field until nobody remained. Plot twist! As Pidcock fought off Victor Koretzky of France at the end of the third lap he punctured. But in three respects he had been lucky. It was a front wheel, marginally quicker to replace. He was mercifully close to the tech zone. And he still had plenty of time to get back in the race.

As Kristensen affixed the new wheel, Pidcock simply took a slug of his gel, stared calmly out into the middle distance, reassessed his new hand of cards. This in itself is a gift as formidable as any of Pidcock’s physical talents. The ability to live off his wits, to exist entirely in the moment, to handle debilitating setbacks with an immaculate calmness. Getting Covid at the Tour two weeks before the Olympics wasn’t part of the plan. Breaking his collarbone two months before Tokyo wasn’t part of the plan. And nor was this. Forty seconds down and fuming, Pidcock simply levered himself back into contention at a murderous, menacing pace.

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And so to the last lap, the duel on the hill, an epic tussle, a genuinely Great Olympic Moment. Koretzky, the world No 1 and a multiple winner on the World Cup circuit, stayed with Pidcock on the brutal climb at the start of the lap, overtook him at the last feed zone. At which point Pidcock could have panicked. He could have thrown everything into some Hail Mary move that might well have sent him tumbling into the dirt.

Instead, with seconds to go, he spied a gap through the trees and simply forced his way through it, clipping Koretzky’s heel on the way through. In many ways it was the final act of a kind of Total Cycling masterclass: the endurance, the patience, the bike-handling, the pure speed and finally the astonishing burst of audacity.

That dusty Pinarello bike will soon be taking pride of place in Pidcock’s Andorra home. He keeps all his winning bikes, keeps all his jerseys and racing numbers, a measure of his preoccupation with history and lineage. This is why he wanted to defend his title, this is why a Tour de France contender still goes skidding up and down muddy hills, this is why a gold medal favourite calmly sucks on an energy gel while his race-ruining puncture gets fixed. Pidcock gets that true greatness isn’t just what you win. It’s the memories you make in the process.