Simon Barnes blogs from Beijing

It begins with a vicious spit of gunfire and it ends 12 hours later in a howl of exhaustion. Some people think that the modern pentathlon should be kicked out of the Olympic Games because it is completely mad. For exactly that reason, it should always remain.

And to make it still more fun, British women are good at it. Yesterday, Heather Fell shot, fenced, swam, rode and ran herself into second place, winning silver behind Lena Schoneborn, of Germany. She began the 3,000 metres run 19 seconds adrift and closed the gap appreciably, but the German held on to the advantage she had spent so long working for.

Ah, if Fell could have one shot back, if she could have stabbed a few more people in the vitals, if she could have swam a PB, if she could have hit one fence fewer in the showjumping, it might all have been different.

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But that’s it: you have to be good at five disciplines, all on the same day, all of them almost humourously different, demanding of different skills, different mindsets, different personalities. And somehow, you have to string them all together into a coherent whole. The event is absurdly volatile: a specialist in one event can leap dizzyingly ahead, only to find humiliation if the next event should be the weak one.

An athlete in fearsome triumph in the morning can look feeble in the afternoon and strong again in the evening. It all began at 8.30am, when Fell’s jet-lagged parents overslept and missed the start. You begin the biggest day of your life seeking not strength or speed, but inner calm, a hard thing to ask. Fell opened up with a ten: the volley of the 36 pistols cracking the morning air with the aforementioned vicious spit.

Pistol shooting in the modern pentathlon is about rhythm and movement rather than perfect stillness: the pistol starts high and is swept gracefully down before, in the moment of calm and balance, the shot is fired, and the ten scored — or not, of course. But then you move straight into the passionate drama of the fencing. You must fight 35 separate duels, a one-hit match against every other competitor. The air full of the tinkle of cutlery, the shriek, the squeal and the roar of the contestants. It was here that Schoneborn made her mark on the competition, losing just seven of her bouts. “My tip was working, I could do what I wanted and get a hit,” she said. Fell lost 15 bouts.

After that, to the pool, where the hours and years of endless lengths must claim their reward, and Fell was moving up the field. The German kept her edge, though it was narrowing. Then comes the showjumping, a test this time of sympathy and nerve and balance — how can a person be good at all these things? The horses are borrowed, chance rides, and Fell’s horse, Lele, was listed as “lazy” and spurs and a whip were recommended. But Fell didn’t go out and bully and get the animal all sour and mutinous. She rode with touch and a fair amount of trust, and the horse responded. Two down, but Schoneborn had just the one, a classy ride on a horse that was listed, a trifle bewilderingly to a horseman, as “normal”.

Which left that un-make-up-able 19 seconds in the final event, the one that simply tests how much you’ve got left. As the long day wound to a close in an ever-winding course around the stadium, up and down, in and out, round and round, the gap narrowed, but never enough to have you shouting. And so a silver medal: and a panting, excited Fell telling us all what a lovely day she’d been having.

Not bad for someone who’d almost given up the sport after a long run of injury and disappointment. She lost her funding, went back to live with her parents, decided to keep going on her own and so financed her training for five sports by doing three part-time jobs. “It was a kick in the a*** that I needed,” she said, radiant in silver with Union Jack nails.

There is talk, yet again, about changing the format of this sport. The latest idea is to combine the run and the shoot, to make it like the biathlon, in which you ski and shoot. The idea is to make mod-pen a bit more sexy, a bit more rational.

A pox on your sexiness, say I, a curse on your rationality. This sport is a joy because it is mad. It was invented by the man who had the mad idea of of founding the modern Olympic Games, Baron de Coubertin, and that idea didn’t work out too badly. But the Olympics are nothing without the touches of madness, and the modern pentathlon is, and I hope always will be, an event of compelling craziness.