"Thank you and . . . I love you!" The Irish Special Olympics athlete Margaret Walsh, from Midleton, Co Cork, has just performed her rhythmic floor exercise at Shanghai's International Gymnastics Centre. She is glowing. When she arrives back at the family seating area, she makes straight for her mother, flings her arms around her and gives her a big hug.
It's the kind of moment which, frankly, makes the Special Olympics truly special. Still, competing also counts at the games - and the Irish gymnasts have been holding their own against a battery of accomplished Chinese, Russian and Czech opponents, winning both medals and friends in the enormous arena known in Irish circles in Shanghai as "the stadium with the Tescos underneath".
The Irish athletes have been making themselves right at home, sailing through their prescribed exercises with ease. Not, as Irish team coach April Coates explains, that it's been easy. "The routine must be done exactly as it's set down. So if you go off into the right-hand corner instead of the left-hand corner, they'll deduct you very heavily. If you do a body wave before an arabesque instead of the other way round, you'll lost more marks. And you have to stay on your toes at all times - which is very hard for the girls with lower body tone."
In contrast to the equestrian events in Shanghai, which have been constantly running behind schedule, the gymnastics competitions are run with military precision. As one athlete performs, the next is waiting to go. There are two set pieces of music. Within half an hour we've heard them so often that they might as well have been chiselled into our brains. Yet each athlete puts a different slant on the routine. As soon as they finish, giant electronic scoreboards at either end of the gymnasium flash up results and detailed marks. It's a weird mixture of mathematics and magic.
Waiting for her turn on the floor, the Lisburn athlete Lesley Farmer tells us how she has been spending her time in Shanghai. As part of the host town programme she spent part of a day with a Chinese family in their home, where she learned how to make dumplings. "I love Chinese food," she says. "I like the meats, plus the rice and noodles. We also had a wee sightseeing tour around the most famous places in the city."
Asked how it felt to perform her rhythmic routine in front of a capacity crowd of Chinese schoolchildren, Margaret Walsh declared: "it's brilliant. Absolutely fabulous."
The same might be said of the Irish gymnastics team as a whole. By the time yesterday's results were totted up, it had netted 13 gold medals in the games so far - with the possibility of more to come today.