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...