After the euphoria of the past nine months, this was the reality check. We have become so used to success by British cyclists, success that is flagged up months in advance, that it is easy to forget that cycling is a sport where the random element can never be eliminated. That, after all, is the essence of the sport: man's attempt to make sense of the unpredictable stuff thrown up by the road and the opposition.

Mark Cavendish and his team finished this race completely spent after their attempts to control events were thwarted by concerted attacks from almost every other team in the race, with the Swiss, the Italians and the Belgians to the fore. There should be no complaints, however, although the British might perhaps regret the lack of a plan B.

The gold medal for Alexandr Vinokourov will provide the perfect retirement gift for a cyclist who has taken the sport to the heights in his native Kazakhstan while plunging it into the grimmest depths elsewhere. Vinokourov brings with him enough baggage to keep Pickfords busy for a month, and he remains unrepentant about the blood doping that cost him two years of his career. Superb bike rider as he is in terms of tactical nous and aggression, he was not a winner who can shed any light on the sport's past, or give it optimism for its future unless your eyes light up at the prospect of a further influx of oil cash from the Wild East.

Cavendish crossed the line in 29th place, displaying the same grim set face he had shown in Beijing after he and Bradley Wiggins had flopped in the Madison. His quest for an Olympic gold medal will have to wait another four years. In the end – and there was no discredit in this – his four team-mates proved unable to square the tactical conundrum that came in appointing "the fastest man in the world" as their leader: they knew they would have to hold back on the Box Hill climb to keep their leader in touch, that this would allow escapees to disappear up the road, putting them on the back foot. Cavendish finished the race with a half-flat front tyre after a puncture sustained in the run-in.

What did for British hopes was a spectacular, perfectly timed move from Fabian Cancellara on the last of the nine ascents of Box Hill, just as it looked as if the race was coming together to the final run into central London. The hulking Swiss took with him a bevy of other strongmen who had bided their time on the circuits: his team-mate Michael Albasini, the Colombian Rigoberto Urán, who would eventually take the silver medal, Vinokourov, and the Spaniards Alejandro Valverde and Luis León Sánchez.

"It went on legs, we were always racing at Mark's pace on the climb so we couldn't react to those sort of things, it was never our plan," said David Millar. "A lot of teams were launching their strongest riders up the road to tire us out, and it worked. But it backfired for a lot of those teams as well. There were a lot of good sprinters with us who had a chance of getting medals. It was coming back nicely, we'd been racing for five hours, didn't have that extra bit.

"All we needed was a couple of extra guys but most were exhausted or had guys up the road. It was a slim chance, but with every team racing to thrash our race up it was going to be hard to do it."

"Other teams were content that if they didn't win, we wouldn't win," said Cavendish, somewhat unfairly singling out the Australian team for "negative" tactics. "We expected it. If you want to win you've got to take it to them. We controlled it with four guys for 250km and we couldn't do more."

Cancellara and company rapidly caught up with a lead group of about 20, some survivors of a move that had gone clear before the race reached Box Hill, a group that included the veteran Australian Stuart O'Grady, who would finish sixth. They were a small peloton in their own right, 32 men united by a single goal: to evade Cavendish and avoid a sprint. The gap to the field was never more than a minute, hovering about 50sec, but that was too much, with three Spaniards and three Swiss to set the pace.

The British worker bees – Wiggins, Chris Froome, Millar and Ian Stannard – had been at the front controlling matters since the race entered the leafy suburbs with O'Grady and 11 companions in the lead and, not surprisingly, they did not have quite enough in the tank. The only other team without a rider in the massive lead group was Germany, and they were slow to commit more than one rider to the chase. The breeze that blew on the riders' backs as they sped at 40mph through Oxshott, Esher and Kingston upon Thames meant that the speed needed if the bunch were to close the gap was simply not sustainable.

As, one by one, Froome, Millar and Wiggins dropped back from the front of the field, completely spent, the Swiss plan went awry on Star and Garter corner in Richmond Park when Cancellara locked his back wheel and ploughed into the barriers. He appeared to have damaged his collarbone, which will not help his chances in Wednesday's time trial. As the big Swiss struggled, Urán jumped clear in Upper Richmond Road, and Vino went with him, clearly determined to improve on the silver medal he took in Sydney to Jan Ullrich. His experience was always going to tell and he duly dumped Urán 250m from the line.

This was, suggested the president of the International Cycling Union, Pat McQuaid, the biggest crowd ever seen for any Olympics, with a million people estimated to be lining the roadsides of Surrey. Apart from the strangely empty lower slopes of Box Hill – closed to crowds to conserve the natural habitat – and a handily empty stretch of wall outside the Priory where the peloton took an early natural break, the crowds exceeded those on a Tour de France stage, lining the verges and pavements four, five and six deep.

The union jacks waved in their thousands, one sign along the way read "Mod is God", Prince Charles and Camilla turned out on the Mall to meet the riders before they left – but the swell of national optimism that had built since Cavendish won last year's world championship, and had surged during Wiggins's Tour de France win, was not enough to ensure the race went the way of Great Britain.