Gravity is for wimps. And it was as if a nation had taken wing - flying above an abyss of disappointment. China won the men’s team gymnastics competition, the medal they wanted to win above all others.

Ask Zhen Dong if you don’t believe me, but we’ll have more from Zhen in a moment.

For the first, savour the joy: Li Xiaopeng, in the final exercise, the vault; fouth to go in his team. He went for a tsukahara - that’s the one with a tumble on to the springboard followed by a period flight on to the vault, and another impossibly long flight away from it.

In that final flight, Li performed a somersault with double twist, spotted the landing there or thereabouts and the world exploded into a sea of hugging Chinese. They’d got the maths right and they’d won. You don’t get joy like that without the added mixture of a terrible amount of fear. The joy came in buckets because fear, like gravity, had been overcome.

Inscrutable, eh? I’ll have to get a new book of cliches: I haven’t seen so much uninhibited Chinese joy since the mad firecracking Chinese New Years of my Hong Kong past. It was New Year again, and Christmas as well - and the end of an era and the start of a new one.

The Chinese have the best men’s team in the world. You can take that as read; everybody else did. But nobody was one hundred per cent convinced they would win. Sure, they always win the world championships, but since when has that impinged on the world’s consciousness?

This is when it matters. I love best these quadrennial sports: the sports that go into a four-year hibernation, remote from public attention, only to emerge again for the next Olympic Games, with names and faces half-remembered and half-forgotten, new names and new skills.

These are the Olympic heartland sports - not tennis and baseball and football - and they matter more than anything. They matter because they means so much to the competitors: here in the heartland you invariably find - at the weight-lifting, the Greco-Roman wrestling, and in the gym - the best against the best against the best, people who have dedicated four years or a lifetime to this one perfect moment in the public gaze.

It is a very long time between one Games and the next; and for four years, China have been living with their humiliation in Atlanta. They went into the Games then as firm favourites, as usual, and suffered a massive corporate choke, handing victory to the Russians, a fact that did not soften the blow.

It was the team event they wanted, for China prefers corporate to individual brilliance. This is so much the case that they turned down a sure-fire gold medal for a chance of the team: Zhen Dong - yes, him - would have been a lay-down certainty for the rings. But he is a one-discipline specialist, and not what was wanted.

All-round corporate brilliance - a very Chinese sort of concept. And they supplied it without stinting: a sustained performance of grace and fastidious strength. They did so despite a series of performances of individual brilliance from the great Russian Alexei “Sexy Lexy” Nemov.

It develops so fast, this sport, they are still learning how to do it. As people say again and again that we are nearing the limits of human potential in the measured sports such as track and field, so we see that in gymnastics, the incredible feat of four years back is so ordinary that nobody bothers to do it at this level.

Last time, Nemov stunned the world with a piked kovacs - the somersaulting release-and-catch on the high bar. This time around, the big move was to perform the somersault piked but fully laid out - twice as hard because there is twice as much body-length to rotate. It is the single most stunning move, not in gymnastics but in the entire Games.

The Chinese were all superb, that was the point. Early on, Xing Aowei spotted his dismount from the high bar and instead of holding the pose in the classic get-me-judge fashion, he punched the air. It was the start of an epidemic of air-punching and high-fiving. The Chinese had got a sniff of the quarry and they were hunting it down.

It is marvellous to watch how team morale operates in a sport based entirely on the doings of the individual. Confidence flowed from performance to performance, from man to man. It became a procession of seamless excellence. Like Redgrave and the boys, they put clear water between themselves and their rivals, and eventually pulled away in something like comfort.

Russia were pushed into third place by a strong performance from Ukraine, a blow to a country with a history of global dominance. It was a new world for the Chinese, and it was jolly good for all kinds of things like their bid for the 2008 Games. But never mind all that. The truth is in the tumbling.

There were some special bits: Li’s double layout somersault on the floor was something to savour - no human being should be able to do that - but the overall impression was of a shared thing, a team thing, of the remorseless plot of six men to defeat the twin imposters of gymnastics: fear and gravity.