8.55am: Toa Payoh Sports Hall: table tennis

OUTSIDE they say, (what else?), temperature please. Inside, there's a fever growing. Early morning, kids with clappers, yelling 'Let's go, Singapore', can be tiresome. Not today. These Games need enthusiasm and even if the crowds are thin and they've trucked in sports school kids, it gives the stadium an energy. Isabelle Li, Singapore's bonsai warrior, feels it, feeds on it. Home advantage is food, weather and your name being bellowed.

These Games has been kicked around, some of it within reason. Note to next year's YOG organisers: allocate funds for advertising. Cab drivers are the best salesmen usually, and should be saying 'Hey, you no go AYG?' Yet my guy was more interested in the ambulance outside than the sport inside.

Spread the word because every stadium at these Games has a story, every arena has heartbreak. Drama in sport is not the prerogative of adults, everyone has dreams and on table 3, one is being lived.

Japan's Tanioka Ayuka is testing world Under-15 No. 1 Chen Meng from China. She's spinning chopping, flicking. She's up one game to love, then two, then matchpoint. She can touch victory, but can't catch it, the matchpoint goes, then another, and she's never the same. Ernest Hemingway, once asked to describe guts, said 'grace under pressure'. Chen Meng, who wins this world-class contest, defines it.

Table tennis is fun because it's a theatrical business, where players hold artistic poses before serving, ball balanced on palm like some precious pearl. It is also serious business, you know this, because 10 cameras on stilts are peering at the tables. Every team are videoing themselves.

At Isabelle's table, more chopping is to be found than at a morning fish market. There is a tension to the game, like a plot being revealed; eventually Isabelle proves the better detective and solves her opponent. In the afternoon, she'll lose to the Chinese, but for now life is beautiful.

12.30pm: Yishun Safra: shooting

Everybody cries. Ask Federer. But the Chinese girl can't stop, no tissue, no hug, no consolation can stop this river. Don't think, for even a cynical second, that these Games don't mean much.

In the lobby, outside the shooting hall, there is a fine sense of an Asian party, as nationalities and languages collide. Singapore's perky Carene Loo, who just misses the girls' air-pistol final, says: 'I'm getting to learn things in a fun way.'

Bjorn Borg has a resting heart rate of 50. These shooters look icier. Blinkers on, feet seemingly set in cement, heavy gun as still as a cocked finger, they are more fun to watch than you think.

But wait, there's a girl missing. Vietnam's Thi Ngoc Duong Nguyen has trouble: her trigger weight is less than 500 grams, it's too light, it's illegal.

Later, through a Singaporean liaison officer, who calls a Vietnamese official, who asks the girl questions, and then calls me, we discover she had to use a male shooter's gun. Of course, it affects her, she comes in eighth, but with her second shot she does something astonishing: she shoots a 10.9, a perfect shot, and wears a smile that would enchant any prince.

The Chinese girl just weeps. She was leading, then fell apart, and it strikes me, in no other profession does this happen, this expression of such grief in public.

South Korea's Kim Jangmi wins and is learning her own lessons. Competing amidst so many athletes bring nerves, she says, it also brings impromptu lessons in handling the media.

Smile, smile, the photographer pleads. No, she says. She has a crooked tooth.

4pm: Bishan Stadium: athletics

It's the strangest, saddest, funniest thing. The 800m boys finishes with an Indian, Ravi Kumar, and an Iranian, Amir Beyranvand, on the ground. Everything has been given, every iota of will, every ounce of energy, and they lunge and fall.

Then Beyranvand slaps the ground, kneels in prayer, puts up a single finger to my colleague to indicate he's first. Then Kumar, grin slicing from ear to ear, tells me in Hindi when asked: 'I won'.

There is no scoreboard, no one knows, but a part of me is praying for a deadheat, with both winning. It doesn't happen, only Kumar wins.

The high jumpers don't care, they just want to jump, skittering at an angle to the bar and leaping like electrocuted salmon over it.

But every race they have to stop because their run-up starts on the track. They're like some entertainment between runners, second-class citizens of the athletic world. They're not alone. From the other end of the field comes a concert of grunts. Ah, the shot-putters have begun.

The crowd is strong, swelling, this feels like a major meet. When the 100 metres is about to start, a church-like silence descends, broken only by a gun shot.

Later, Shahrir Mohammed Anuar, whose sentences come out ragged because his breath is, says he picks out a sponsor's sign ahead of the finish line and focuses on it, not to get distracted.

Every small thing matters. Behind the stadium, race done, Myint Swi Li from Myanmar, who is third in the 800m girls, gets up and reaches out her hand to the shy Indian, Namita Kabat, who won. It's nothing, yet it's everything, a connection between kids, nations, athletes, it's why we have these Games.

6.29pm: Singapore Sports School: swimming

Quah Ting Wen is swimming but I'm watching David Lim. He is suffering. A coach can't swim a race for his charge, but he lives every stroke.

Lim is yelling and scribbling stroke rates, he is both supporter and scientist. He tells Ting Wen before the race, 'believe in your abilities'. It is too late for long speeches, he confesses. She is nervous, but the coach in Lim is confident: 'I think she can break two minutes.'

Ting Wen swims likes she's coated in oil, smooth, unhurried, as graceful as a member of a water ballet troupe. By her third length of four in the girls' 200m freestyle, it is all to much for Lim, he is making a pushing motion with his body as if he's trying to make her go faster.

It works. She wins, in under two minutes, and the pool deck, suffocated by a strong crowd, explodes. I find Lim, he talks about split times, he's also searching for Ting Wen. Then student and professor of the water meet in the warm-up pool, and embrace.

I have to go, deadlines are calling. But as I exit the school, I hear a sound that brings a smile at the end of a long day. It is the strains of Majulah Singapura.

rohitb@sph.com.sg