Apeldoorn's Omnisport opened in 2008 in the city's south, a multi-purpose hall built around a 250-metre Siberian pine velodrome and surrounded by space for athletics, gymnastics, and concerts. It is a building that loves cycling. Sightlines are good, the steep banking of the track puts every spectator close to the action on the back straight, and the acoustic does what a velodrome acoustic should do: it gives a packed home crowd the power to lift a Dutch rider just enough to find an extra tenth of a second. In October 2013 the European Cycling Union brought the fourth edition of the senior European Track Championships here, three days of racing across the ten Olympic events plus the men's madison and the points races. Twenty-four nations sent riders. The hosts were ready.

What followed was a championships of refreshing competitive depth. Gold medals were spread across five different teams, and medals across ten - this was not a one-nation procession. Germany finished on top of the medal table with three golds and three silvers, the kind of return that confirmed their place as the dominant European track power of the era. Great Britain took the most medals overall with eight, three of them gold, matching Russia's three. The host Netherlands, riding to noise that climbed every time a rider in orange entered the boards, took two golds and six medals altogether - by some distance their strongest performance at this level. The numbers tell a story of a sport in healthy form: enough nations investing seriously in track cycling to make the medal hunt unpredictable from event to event.

Individually the meet belonged to a handful of stars at the height of their powers. Laura Trott of Great Britain - who would later compete as Laura Kenny and become her country's most decorated female Olympian - took two gold medals, including her share of those world-record team pursuits. Kristina Vogel of Germany, the sprint specialist whose career would later be cut short by a training crash, won three medals at this meet, including gold in the women's sprint. On the men's side, Maximilian Levy of Germany matched Trott's double, and Elia Viviani of Italy did the same: the kind of triple-witching of star talent that makes a meet feel important in real time and historic in retrospect. Five teams shared the golds, but a handful of riders carried most of the headlines.

Among the moments that lasted longest in memory was one that did not produce a gold. In the men's omnium, the multi-discipline points-based contest that rewards the rounded track racer above the specialist, Ireland's Martyn Irvine took bronze. It was Ireland's first ever medal at a senior European Track Championships - the kind of breakthrough that small federations build years of programming around. Irvine, who had already won the world scratch race title earlier in 2013, gave Irish cycling a foothold at continental level that subsequent generations have steadily widened. He stood on the third step of the podium with the tricolour going up beside flags that had been winning here since the Championships began.

Track cycling lives in a strange calendar. It is an Olympic sport, which means much of its public attention arrives in four-year pulses, but its athletes race year-round on a circuit that the casual fan rarely follows. Continental championships like Apeldoorn 2013 are where the racing form gets honed, where new line-ups are tested, where world records like the women's team pursuit get broken not under Olympic lights but in October arenas filled with regional fans and family. Almost every rider on those podiums was thinking about Rio 2016, still three years away. Some of them, including Trott in 2016 and her successors, would convert what they learnt that weekend into Olympic gold. The Omnisport is still a fixture of the European track calendar. The crowd is still loud.