Is it any wonder the British are so good at track cycling? Could any other nation adjust so easily to a sport so utterly beyond comprehension?

The madness began on Monday, in the men's sprint. I confess my prior knowledge of track cycling is not the greatest (we have a number of experts in the office, of which I am not one), but if you said "sprint" to me, I'd assume the aim of the game was to peg it out of the blocks and go as fast as you possible can. Like, say, the 100m sprint in athletics.

And I'd have been wrong. It turns out that for the first few laps, your best bet for Olympic success is to stalk the other cyclist (there are only two at a time) like a lioness tracking down a hapless wildebeest.

Chris Hoy, Scotland's greatest ever Olympian, even ended up having his heat restarted when his opponent stopped still on the track, like a gazelle playing dead, for more than the legal 30 second limit. That had followed more than a minute of snail's-pace, meandering slow-motion pedalling around the Laoshan Velodrome.

That was bonkers enough, but a top Chinese competitor in the women's sprint surpassed it today. Battling against an Australian cyclist for a place in the final (against Britain's own Victoria Pendleton), the Chinese girl fell off having gone so slowly up the banking that, the moment she twisted her wheel, it disappeared from underneath her.

I assumed that meant the Aussie could coast home into the final, but no - it turns out you get to go again if you fall off your bike! What?! In what other sport do you get another go if you do something as silly as falling off your equipment? If your rowing boat capsizes, tough monkeys. If you fall over a hurdle, hard cheese. If your horse lobs you over a fence, c'est la vie. But fall off your bike and you get a second chance.

Does this mean that, if your opponent is streets ahead of you and about to win gold in the Olympic track cycling sprint final, you are within your rights to stop, topple yourself over, and demand a re-run?

The finale to these madcap capers comes in the form of the madison and points races. In these, from what I can gather, six million cyclists clog up the velodrome and the aim is to go round it for as long as it takes everybody to decide to watch something else.

The commentators, charged with the unenviable task of making these races understandable and exciting for us great unwashed, insist there is a complex scoring system involving your ability to put in an extra lap, your position in various "sprints" and one or two other tricks, but for the uninitiated it is genuinely impossible to follow.

We are told that Rebecca Romero, who competed in the women's points race and finished a very creditable 11th, had to have the competition format explained to her on the morning of the final, since she'd only done it a couple of times before. That says it all.

Perhaps these longer, impenetrable races are beyond even the British ken. After all, I think they're the only ones in which GB have not won gold...

I'm briefly coming up for air before the descent into another Olympic maelstrom, to bring you some interesting maps.

When it comes to working out what an area is like for crime, there's nowt better than looking at a top-down view onto which you can plot all the reported nastiness.

Obviously, doing that is another matter. What about burglaries? Plot those on a map and you're waving a mighty great flag over somebody's house, along the lines of: "This one was easy to break into! This one! Here! Next to the tree, with the orange Skoda in the driveway!" Not good.

But if you've ever played Sim City, you'll have an idea of what I mean. Colours shaded across the city to indicate where crime is at its worst, and where there's virtually nothing to trouble the residents.

Here's the Met Police's early attempt at something similar. It's not the greatest looker in the world, but it's actually more detailed than initial impressions suggest. Keep on clicking and you'll get down to "sub-wards", whatever they may be (I'm no councillor in the making), and the colour code corresponds to the level of crime in the area.

Happily, crime chez moi appears to be fairly unusual. I think the map suggested there had been all of two crimes in my sub-ward for the last month.

Given that I cannot remember the last night when I did not hear sirens belting down the road outside, I consider that a minor miracle. If we were judging on sound alone, Northolt would be the centre of an epic campaign of terror the likes of which may never scar the globe again. The map, by contrast, suggests it's actually a bit like living in Ilfracombe. The reality may be somewhere between the two.

The Met aren't the only ones - West Midlands Police have had a go, as have their West Yorks equivalent.

None of which yet compare to the daddies of this idea - the Chicago crime map, and the Booth Poverty Map, which remains one of the most impressive works of cartography I have ever seen, more than a century after its production.

Olympics update: Survived two night shifts earlier and, in fact, must have quite liked them, because I've signed up for five consecutive overnight live text commentary shifts next week. Do stay up and keep me company.

Still doing the US radio on a regular basis. They cut me short today! Cheeky sods. Though they were cutting everybody short so were clearly struggling, and I came off far better than the previous bloke, who had joined live from the Philippines and was practically bundled off air in a sack when he didn't stop talking on cue.

Had the pleasure of writing this Ben Ainslie report today, and the boy had better win gold tomorrow, or else I'm going to look very silly. In my preview of the weekend's Brits with medal chances, I had Ainslie (and the GB Yngling crew) down as "10/10" for gold.

I have been roundly mocked for that decision, since technically Ainslie could be beaten by the American Zach Railey (and nobody else, he's guaranteed silver). But I cannot see how the man could fail, given his 12-point lead with just the medal race remaining. (If you don't know about sailing, I appreciate this will read: "Blargh blargh man blargh blargh, blargh blargh with blargh blargh remaining." Sorry.)

My 10 has since been the subject of some incredibly high-level editorial intervention, and now resides as a 9-and-a-half to account for all eventualities. Chickens, I say. Back the boys!

I sleep badly. Rarely all the way through the night and if I'm on my own I'll regularly be awake from 3am ish for a while. This has its advantages when you've gone to bed at midnight with a transaction at work on the line. Then you've woken up at 3am as all has kicked off. And suddenly you're awake and able to respond and appear vaguely competent. This law thing, it's all about face. At least it's given me the opportunity to watch some of the Olympics - my first time of viewing. This swimming lark? Amazing. The Chinese National Anthem is a bit naff, though and quality of playing, hardly inspiring.