If you want to get an idea of ​​the chaos of the Madison in the sweatbox of a velodrome, all you have to do is watch Neah Evans being helped off the track after winning a hard-fought silver medal.

Out of breath and drenched in sweat, she was wrapped in an ice vest by a Team GB staff member, drank a recovery shake in one go and was brilliantly available for interviews.

“It’s so chaotic,” Evans grins. “There are other events – I don’t want to belittle them – that are simpler.”

“If you are in good shape and implement your plan, you can predict it to some extent.

“On the other hand, in Madison, you can be in the shape of your life and if someone runs into you, it’s over.”

The sights and sounds are amazing. The crack of a starting pistol, then the quiet hum of wheels whizzing across the wooden boards.

The track turns into a tumble dryer of colors as the drivers fight for positions where there seems to be hardly any room to breathe.

Riders are literally propelled into action by their partner as they hold onto their arm and fly past at breathtaking speeds.

Within 10 laps, Evans is caught by a Swiss rider and falls to the floorboard. Nobody knows where to look.

Fortunately, Evans, world champion with Elinor Barker and now a two-time Olympic silver medalist, enjoys the thrill.

The cyclist from Aberdeenshire beamed as she spoke to journalists afterwards. That’s just what she does.

Having only become a professional cyclist in 2017 after working as a veterinarian, she definitely has a new perspective.

She knows a different kind of effort. And then there is the fact that in the spring, despite an illness, she fought her way back to the starting line at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome.

“At the end of April, I came down with EBV (Epstein-Barr virus), a bacterial infection that completely knocked me out,” Evans said.

“The training plan was thrown into disarray. To be honest, if someone had said at that point: ‘You’re going to go to the Olympics and win a silver medal,’ I would have said: ‘No chance.’

“I remember trying to go up a flight of stairs and when I got halfway up I thought, ‘I can’t get up these steps’… It was pretty scary. I’m so happy to have won silver.”