Team GB’s sprinters took a hard-fought silver medal in the Olympic Velodrome, but were unable to prevent Harrie Lavreysen leading the Netherlands to the men’s team sprint title with a world-record time.

In a one-sided final, Great Britain’s sprint trio, of Jack Carlin, Hamish Turnbull and Ed Lowe, were valiant but powerless, as Lavreysen and his teammates, Jeffrey Hoogland and Roy van den Berg, led almost from the first bend.

As the Dutch, having broken the world record earlier in the competition, sped to another record time of 40.949sec, Carlin, Turnbull and Lowe could only look on as Lavreysen and his two teammates moved ahead to raise their arms in celebration.

“I think we’ve executed three really solid races there and can be proud of that as a team,” Carlin said. “We knew that we would be up against it coming into it, but we stuck to our process and stuck to what we wanted from each race.”

Carlin was first to acknowledge the scale of Team GB’s achievement against the world’s best sprint team. “As a team, we came and delivered,” he said, before adding that silver was “probably the best we could have done on the day”.

“Two boys that came in without any experience really at this kind of level,” Carlin said of his two teammates. “They’ve really stepped up and I’m proud of them.”

Lowe said: “A silver medal was something I didn’t think was possible going into this so second place, I’ll definitely take that to the Dutch.”

Turnbull added: “We weren’t expecting to fight for gold. We were chasing the bronze really, so to get into that gold final, all the stress was off.

“We could really enjoy it, soak up the crowd and show everyone what we could do without really any pressure on our backs.”

But taking silver did not tell the whole story. Carlin’s presence in Paris had been threatened by injury. The 27-year-old broke his ankle in April, when one of the cranks on his bike snapped, and faced a race against time to get fit enough for Paris.

Carlin, who said that he had been feeling “very positive” at the time, had just claimed a silver medal in the team sprint, in the Nations Cup.

The ankle injury, falling just three months before the Paris Games, left him reeling. “I didn’t really have time to even think about it,” he said. “Straight away I had a rehab plan and I just got stuck into that.”

Once again, records tumbled in the sauna-like conditions of the world’s fastest velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, but this time, at least in terms of sprinting, it was the Dutch that led the way.

Britain performed at a high level throughout the sprints, beating Germany in the first round, with Carlin’s flying last lap taking them through to the gold medal race.

But the scale of their task was quickly evident, as the Dutch, spearheaded by Lavreysen, broke the world record for the first time, beating Canada, with a time of 41.191.

Carlin, who won silver and bronze medals in Tokyo, had already appeared on the podium in the Olympic Velodrome, in 2016, when he won silver in the team sprint in the European championships, with Ryan Owens and Joseph Truman.

But he has acknowledged in the past that Lavreysen, gold medallist in the individual and team sprint in the Tokyo Olympics and a multiple world title holder, may well be the greatest track sprinter ever.

In the women’s team pursuit qualifiers, New Zealand, breathing down the neck of another world record with a time of 4min 04.679sec, Italy and Australia, led the way.

Two days after winning gold in the women’s road race, Kristen Faulkner rolled away with her American teammates, Chloé Dygert, Lily Williams and Jennifer Valente, to set the second-fastest time to date.

Team GB’s quartet, of Elinor Barker, Josie Knight, Anna Morris and Jessica Roberts, set off quicker than any before them, but then fell behind New Zealand to finish as third-best qualifier, which, in Katie Archibald’s absence, was a solid performance.

The men’s pursuit team was shuffled for their first-round match with Denmark, with Charlie Tanfield coming in – alongside Ethan Hayter, Ollie Wood and Ethan Vernon – for Dan Bigham, who revealed that he had crashed in training last Saturday.

With the winners automatically going through to race for gold, the British quartet initially led, but by the halfway point, had slipped behind the Danes. In the final kilometre, Team GB narrowed the gap and went on to win with a time of 3:42.151, a hair’s breadth short of the world record of 3:42.032.

Australia’s four were even faster and had the reigning Olympic champions, Italy, on the ropes from the off in their first-round heat, setting a new world record of 3:40.730.

In Wednesday’s final, Team GB will face the Australians in the final. It seems almost certain that it will require yet another world-record time to secure the gold medal.