The women’s Madison has taken a while to be put on the World Cup programme but this was a dramatic beginning for the two-rider relay, with the Celtic duo of local star Katie Archibald and Wales’s Manon Lloyd snatching a last-gasp win from France’s Laurie Berthon and Coralie Demay in the final sprint in spite of suffering a heavy crash 19 laps into the 80-lap race. Lloyd gave Wales their third medal of the evening following bronzes for Sam Harrison in the points race and Lewis Oliva in the keirin.

The 26-rider field endured a false start followed by a two-rider crash involving Demay and the Australian Alexandra Manley as officials attempted to stop the peloton, but not long after the race was under way there was a more serious incident approaching the second sprint, as Lloyd took over from Archibald only to find herself squeezed into her partner as the rider above her failed to make space. That brought down five riders including both Britons, with the Belgian Kaat Van Der Meulen carried away on a stretcher.

“Someone closed down on top of Manon and I was still there,” said Archibald. “There was nowhere to go. We all came down in a domino.” Her partner said: “I thought it was all over there and then.”

Both Lloyd and Archibald took a few laps to get back off the deck but once they had regained their places the race boiled down to a three-way battle with France and Ukraine, with a 15-lap mid-race escape inspired by the Scot – visibly the strongest rider in the field – yielding maximum points in two sprints. Archibald landed a third sprint in a row to close to two points on the French with 20 laps to go, and in the finale Lloyd handed her in at the perfect moment, enabling her partner to lead out the sprint over the last two laps to take double points ahead of Berthon and thus land the gold.

This felt like another landmark on the road to gender parity, in many ways a logical and overdue consequence of the decision to bring in the team pursuit in 2007, as that in turn resulted in an expansion of the pool of women’s endurance riders. There are strong indications that the Madison – an Olympic discipline until 2008 – may return in Tokyo for both sexes, which would give parity to the endurance and sprint sides of track racing. There are arguments that the discipline is too complex for television but compared with the offside and scrum rules the blend of laps and sprints is relatively simple.

Britain’s Manon Lloyd, left, and Katie Archibald celebrate on the podium after winning the women’s Madison final. Photograph: Neil Hanna/AFP/Getty Images

The move would delight coaches, the consensus being that the unique demands this discipline makes on riders in terms of bike handling and spatial awareness – it has been compared to Quidditch on two wheels – makes it the ideal means to build these qualities in young cyclists. The Madison has become a foundation stone of the British rider development system in the past 12 years, and Mark Cavendish and this year’s sprint find Dan McLay – who would make an ideal partnership for Tokyo assuming Sir Bradley Wiggins does not postpone his retirement yet again – are just two of the many beneficiaries.

The Glasgow crowd saw their other local, Mark Stewart, fall agonisingly short of a medal in the points race, where the Australian Cameron Meyer dominated, lapping the field three times; in the battle for the silver medal Stewart held an initial advantage after an early lap with the Australian, but as the Frenchman Benjamin Thomas piled on the pressure in the final 20 laps, the Dundee rider’s legs eventually gave out.

Almost simultaneously Harrison emerged to join Thomas and Meyer in taking a lap gain as the chequered flag beckoned, to overtake Stewart for bronze by a single point. Harrison raced here four years ago for Great Britain as part of the team pursuit squad and has his eyes set on a return to national colours in the discipline, although here he was racing as part of the Welsh Commonwealth Games development squad, USN.

That was followed immediately by a second bronze for the Welsh thanks to a clever ride by Oliva behind Tomas Babek of the Czech Republic in the keirin, which has been subtly altered for this Olympic cycle: the pacing motorbike now swings off at three laps to go, half a lap earlier than before. It sounds insignificant but whereas in the past a strong rider such as Sir Chris Hoy could make his move as the motorbike moved away, the extra 125m is enough to make the riders stall briefly before launching their sprints, making for a more tactical race.