A 19-stone mad bear playing handball, a homeless Ukrainian fencer and skateboarders on their backsides: What we found on our search for the... SOUL OF THE OLYMPICS

Mohamed Aly isn't the greatest, but it is reasonable to assume few in his world of handball would argue back if he chose to declare it.

You see, Aly is a 19st bear of a man, an Egyptian goalkeeper with a thick beard and a paunch that creeps ever so slightly over the front of his black jogging bottoms. When he roars, which is often, it can fill a large hall, rising above the crowd yelling his name.

If those present didn't know him before arriving at the South Paris Arena on Monday, then they were gloriously well informed by the close of play. They were all calling for him, screaming for him, egging him on, peeking down a rabbit hole and finding a mad and brilliant wonderland. Aly, Aly, Aly.

When that chorus boomed out, he would turn to face the noise, a game against Denmark going on around him, and beat his chest hard with both fists. Or he would thump a goal post and rattle the entire frame. Or he would pound on the sides of his head, before resuming his big-man's ballet and springing into save after improbable save, an athlete lifted by the circumstances and screaming repeatedly in the faces of world champions.

Mail Sport caught up with him towards the tail end of a wonderful sporting journey, at approximately 3pm and halfway through Egypt's preliminary round against the superstars of his sport.

By then we had chatted to the Micronesian judoka whose island might soon disappear beneath the Pacific, a Syrian refugee who dropped two tears of happiness for every one of raw anger, and we had watched a Ukrainian fencer whose home was blown up by a Russian rocket.

There were also skateboarders flat on their backs, beach volleyball players on a downer, and last of all a pair of North Korean table tennis players with no biographical details.

Out of them, only the North Koreans won and yet each was a piece of what we had set out looking for: the soul of the Olympic Games.

In other corners of Paris, there were deafening shouts of glory, of British names we have come to know and follow. Tales like that of Tom Pidcock and his bike ride over and down Elancourt Hill, the winning eventers and their horses, and the small, silver splashes of Tom Daley and Noah Williams. But we don't hear much about handball and we hear less about Aly.

When the Olympics come round, the beauty is choice. The beauty is the unfamiliarity of what we are seeing. The beauty is learning something new every half hour and wondering, if only for a fortnight, how you ever did without it. But how do you choose when your options are all so beautifully unfamiliar and the tombola is so impossibly big?

Sometimes the only answer is to ride the surprise and walk into a random hall, where any given turn will place you next to an athlete having the best or worst or most eye-catching day of their life. On this day, that hall contained Aly.

'In my culture, it is in our character to get hot when we play sport,' he told Mail Sport in a soft, calm whisper a short while after a quite epic 30-27 defeat.

'Maybe in the UK, handball is not a well-known sport. For my country, for many countries, it is big.'

Egypt are good, but they won't probably win these Olympics, so we have to look at success and failure as relative concepts. At a Games where there are 10,714 athletes and 329 gold medals, it is necessary to view it that way.

For Aly, success might be going face-to-face with Mikkel Hansen, who has won the past three world titles with Denmark, an Olympic gold medal in 2016, and a couple of years ago was earning 80,000 Euros a month at PSG. For us, the joy might be the sight of Hansen flinching time and again when brought into contact with a mad bear.

For the Australian beach volleyball team of Mark Nicolaidis and Izac Carracher, a pair of students, it was a day of failure. We saw them at 9am and again 40 minutes later when they lost against the Italians under the gaze of the Eiffel Tower.

'Not what we wanted,' said Nicolaidis. 'But we have to build from it.'

That is a standard sporting narrative. What we discovered in the judo hall a few hundred yards away at 10.30am was quite different. Success for Muna Dahouk was being here; defeat was only a failure of sorts for a 28-year-old who is one of the 37 athletes in the refugee team.

'I left Syria in 2019,' she told Mail Sport. 'It was the civil war and my father died of heart attack from the stress so I went to the Netherlands. Being at the Olympics, is a great day for me, but I am angry I lost. With the points.'

A bad piece of refereeing will always sting, no matter what route is taken to the mat.

Shortly after Duhouk finished sharing her story, we encountered a girl a little over half her age, Nera Tiebwa. She is 15 and from Kiribati, part of Micronesia and the only island that straddles all four hemispheres.

She carried the flag at the opening ceremony and is part of an athlete delegation of three. Due to global warming, her country could vanish under the waves a couple of generations from now, but she had the grin of the happiest girl on earth after losing 10-0. Behind her, Kaja Kajzer, a Slovenian who was fifth in Tokyo, had lost in the round of 32 and was utterly inconsolable.

Again, they are the different faces of the Olympics. In the case of Olena Kravatska, a Ukrainian fencer under the great glass dome of Grand Palais, a little further up the Seine at 11.30am, she had the perspective of knowing it could be worse than a 15-14 defeat to the second seed - her family home in Odesa was reduced to smithereens by the Russians on December 29.

Her scream still filled the room; the American skateboarder Jagger Eaton, world No 4, laughed into the sky when he came off a rail at 1.30pm and landed flat on his backside. Familiar sports, weird sports, sports that we don't think are sports – you see them all at a Games.

Just as we saw a pair of North Koreans in whom very information is available, beyond their names of Ri Jong Sik and Kim Kum-Yong, move into the final of the table tennis mixed doubles at 5pm. Their nation has only ever won 16 gold medals so that would be quite a story.

That would talk to the soul of the Olympics. Whether it could top the sight of mad bear of Egypt charming a crowd of total strangers is another matter altogether.