Brits survive dirty tricks at the Games to add to their medal haul

And yet that only told half the story on a day when the Olympic Games descended into the kind of acrimony and controversy that has become its trademark over the years.

It was the Mail wot won it: Our picture of Sarah Stephenson clearly connecting with the head of Zhong Chen forced officials to overturn the result

Yesterday, the 2008 Beijing Olympics had it all: a bar-room brawl, masquerading as a boxing contest and an outrageous hometown decision that penalised a plucky Brit, who eventually hit back to win bronze.

All that before Britain confirmed its fourth-place finish on the medals table, with DeGale leading the way with a middleweight gold.

Stevenson's bronze only came after an unprecedented intervention, when judges were forced to overturn an awful decision that had gone in favour of a Chinese competitor in the quarter-finals.

Londoner DeGale, 22, was barely known outside the narrow world of amateur boxing before these Games. Naturally, on this bitterly contested day, his success did not come without rancour. Cuban opponent Emilio Correa, hoping to emulate his father who won gold in Munich in 1972, received a public warning and a two-point deduction from the Korean referee for biting DeGale's chest towards the end of the first of four rounds, two points that would prove to be the margin of victory for the Brit.

Jeered by a large Cuban contingent after his win, DeGale displayed teeth marks just above his left nipple to corroborate his claims.

'He sunk his gold teeth straight into me,' said DeGale, indignant that Correa had tried to deny this as the two sat beside one another at the post-fight conference. 'The Cuban fans were disrespectful, too, at the end when they jeered. It's clear I won.'

DeGale held a seemingly unassailable lead of 6-1 after the first round, which prompted Correa to turn what had been a pleasing display of pugilism into a bar-room brawl that only lacked a honky tonk pianist.

DeGale took the second round 4-3 but in the third was penalised two points and warned for holding, a mystifying decision by the referee as Correa appeared to be as much, if not more, at fault.

The Briton entered the last round with just a two-point advantage, and with the Cuban swinging dangerously.

The fight degenerated further, with both boxers falling over each other on five occasions as they crashed, simultaneously to the floor. But each time Correa picked up a point, DeGale equalised with a counter-punch and he would never hold less than a two-point lead, despite Correa's desperation.

More importantly for his sport, and for beleaguered head coach Terry Edwards, who is under fire from his own Amateur Boxing Association after allegations of serious misconduct by suspended boxer Billy Joe Saunders three months ago, DeGale's surprise elevation provided British boxing with its best Olympic return since 1956 of a gold and two bronzes.

A couple of hours earlier at the taekwondo, Stevenson had to contend with possibly the worst judging witnessed in these Games and on a par with the most shocking decisions in Olympic history.

Pitted against double Olympic champion Cheng Zhong in the over- 67kg weight, she seemed to have secured a famous victory when a kick to Zhong's head, that cut the Chinese girl's lip, should have earned her two points in the last seconds.

Amazingly, the points were not awarded and the referee scored the fight to Zhong, with a tearful Stevenson led from the arena claiming she had been robbed.

No one has overturned a referee's decision in taekwondo before, so a protest seemed futile. But when team manager Gary Hall saw a photograph taken by The Mail on Sunday's Dave Shopland, which clearly showed the hit, he persuaded the judges to look again at TV footage.

Chairman of the judges, Rene Bundeli, stepped into the arena to tell a Chinese crowd their heroine was out.

Stevenson had just 10 minutes to prepare for her semi-final bout against the eventual gold medallist, Mexican Maria de Rosario Espinoza.

The Brit was booed by the crowd and unsurprisingly lost 4-1. In doing so she sprained an ankle but with the help of painkillers came back to beat Egypt's Adb Rabo Noha 6-1 and snatch the bronze.