'MY GUNNOUS,' said the man commentating on the women's skeleton bob racing, for about the 14th time in the last hour.

The man who commentates on the skeleton bob racing in the winter, and the athletics in the summer, says 'My gunnous' a lot.

But this time maybe no other expression would do.

'My gunnous, that's a fast start from the British girl,' he said, and the British girl just got faster and faster all the way down the snaking, icy gully that led her, extremely quickly, a little less than a mile downhill to Olympic gold medal glory.

And my gunnous, didn't we celebrate with her, in the wee small hours of Saturday morning, with all the other lights in the street out and everyone else tucked up in bed, with Reg curled up in the tightest ball he could manage in front of the fire, giving us baleful looks for disrupting his little doggy sleep patterns?

Because the triumph of Amy Williams — the first individual Briton ever to win a Winter Olympic gold medal for a proper sport that actually involves going faster, further or higher than the rest, and not just dancing more nicely — gave us another excuse to do the Weird Sport At A Weird Time thing.

There is something about Olympic Games in far-off places that make you do things like this.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting at the table one morning in 1964 eating my breakfast to the tune of Tokyo Melody by Helmut Zacharias. If the name isn't familiar, the tune will be, because it accompanied the scratchy black and white film of the 1964 Olympics on the BBC, and it was the first time we had ever seen TV at that time of day.

It went 'Dee-dee-da-dee-DEE... Dee-da-dee-da-diddle-dee' but don't take my word for it. Find it on YouTube and transport yourself back 46 years, why don't you?

Breakfast-time TV? Whatever next?

But the Olympics made us do it, and over our Sugar Stars and Ricicles and the various other sugar-drenched cereals that account for our hyperactive mental states today, we watched Mary Rand break the world long jump record and win gold in the process.

It went on from there, and it made instant experts of us on all subjects relating to obscure early-hours sport.

'Down the first ramp from the start house in 4.98 seconds. My gunnous, she is going quickly.' You don't need to tell us that.

We know, because we have been watching, late into the night.

Four years ago we all became late-night experts in the sport of curling, and again that was thanks to insomniacally following the success of the British team.

Barely awake, but kept upright by regular doses of hot tea and Hob-Nobs, we turn to each other and say: 'Yon wee lassie'll need a reekit lang draw through the centre o the hoose, ye ken?', knowing that only Scottish dialect torn fresh from the pages of the Beano will do justice to our Caledonian curling team.

Our Jack Russell terriers open one sleepy eye and cock an ear at us, wondering exactly what the blinking flip we are doing up at this hour.

But sure enough, the great stone spins slowly and curls into the middle of the big targety thing and the match is won. The Scottish popsies have high-fives and wave to their mums as they scoot back up the ice with their slippery shoes and the brooms that look as if they have come from Pound World.

And the glum Germans grumble off to plot dark, icy revenge.

You look at the clock and it's 2am and the alarm is going to go off in less than five hours.

Look around you any morning this week. If one of your work colleagues has deep bags under the eyes and is mumbling incoherently in comic-strip Scottish like one of the Broons, he or she has become a late-night curling fan.

So far in this Winter Olympics we have stayed up to watch cross-country skiing and board cross, which is like downhill rugby without a ball.

The chap who commentates on this doesn't say 'my gunnous', and although he does shriek constantly in a very annoying way, we have forgiven him because he threw himself down the skeleton bob course with a camera strapped to his head and produced one of the great pieces of TV sports reporting in the process.

When the summer Olympics come from somewhere many time zones away, the effect is just as bad.

Hands up everyone who became a rowing aficionado overnight when the Games came from America and we all roared on Redgrave, Pinsent and all their chums? Yes, I thought so.

Into the early hours we sat, struggling to keep our eyes open as racing skiffs tore through the calm water, shadowed on the towpath by people on bicycles and followed by umpires in odd-shaped boats. How we envied them their unbroken sunshine.

There we were, counting stroke rates with Dan Topolski and silently hoping the Australians would fall off their sliding seats or catch crabs, in the nicest possible way. We were instant experts, and when the Brits won by a canvas, we knew exactly how far that was.

We have watched cyclists and short-track skaters do their stuff when all around us sane people are sleeping, and milkmen, bakers and posties are about to begin their working days.

And once, just once, back in 1984, we stayed up until all hours to watch the dancing on ice because Torvill and Dean were doing really well in it, even though we knew deep down that it wasn't really sport at all.

It was catching.

Away from the Olympics we developed the odd hours habit, setting our alarms and getting up at stupid o'clock to watch motor racing from Australia and Japan, shivering in the pre-dawn darkness as Nigel Mansell's back tyre blew up in his ear, or as Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost settled their differences by repeatedly driving into each other.

When the football World Cup came from Japan and Korea we even had to force ourselves to go to the pub early to watch the matches on the big screens.

It was a hardship almost too tough to bear. Real ale at 10 in the morning? Well, it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.

One morning when England were playing, we found ourselves in Cardiff. My dear, naive wife asked a policeman if he knew of a nearby place of refreshment where we could watch the match.

'Who is playing?' he asked. 'England,' she said. 'Who?' he asked again, and, my gunnous, I don't think he was joking.