Simon Barnes is blogging from Beijing every day. Follow his Games here

The Chinese have always had a problem with the notions of individuality and collectivity. Mind you, so does the West; we just start from a different point. Yesterday Yang Wei had to step away from the comfort of being merely the main man in a corporate enterprise and do it by himself. His sense of discomfort was apparent as soon as the men's all-around individual gymnastics competition began.

A couple of days earlier he had led the China team to a resounding victory. He looked serene, composed, almost seraphic. He knew how good he was and he knew how good his team-mates were. The China team fed off each other's talents and certainties - ready to stand up should another slip.

And Yang was at the centre of it all: protected and protecting; leader and led; responsible yet not exposed. The China team were a unit, a collective, and they won the gold medal with a fine inevitability.

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Yesterday he was favourite, a double world champion. He was on his home soil. It was the moment for which all his life had been a preparation. He is 28, at the peak of his powers, with a billion people watching, ready to hate him for ever should he slip up.

There is a joy in freedom, in casting aside responsibility. Freedom is a chance to be yourself absolutely. Well, that's how we see it in the West. Yang felt uncomfortably exposed. Being alone only added to his sense of responsibility. Perhaps no one is ever truly on his own in China, the land of the eternal crowd.

In his early career Yang was nicknamed “The Silver Collector” after finishing second at the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 and at the subsequent World Championships in California in 2003. At the Olympic Games in Athens four years ago, he fell off the high bar when he was expected to win and finished seventh.

So it was not unexpected when he wavered in his floor routine and stepped off the mat. He followed this with a less than inspiring performance on the pommel horse and things were looking dodgy. But that's when we at last got the measure of the man; he put together three storming performances on the next three pieces of apparatus and was away and gone.

His strength and control on the rings were so stunning, so rippling-muscled that Michelangelo should have painted him as a Chinese angel. His vault was a thing of high, twisting nervelessness. And on the parallel bars his balance was unwaveringly perfect, each handstand a perfect vertical, none of that tendency to arch the back that mars even a top-level routine.

Yang's final performance on the high bar was a terrible anticlimax; two gross errors, but he could have fallen off and still won. And then he bathed in the applause like any Westerner filled with his own sense of self. Or was it a reconnection with the collective spirit of his country? Individual, collective. Either way, it was a triumph for Yang.

Magic numbers equal wet weather

Why didn't they ring me up before they decided to hold the Olympic Games in Beijing in August? Don't do it, I'd have said. You know it's the worst month of the year. But they never made the call, the Games continue and it has been hosing down again; real thumping, knee-high, bouncing Asian rain.