Host nation Australia can legitimately claim to be the top sporting country in the world and it is already taken as read that they will top the medal table in Melbourne at the end of the 2006 Commonwealth Games.

Even without the likes of local boy made good Shane Warne - cricket will not feature in the Melbourne extravaganza - Australia's competitors are likely to be competitive in every sport from the swimming pool to the track to the gymnasium and even St Kilda where the triathlon will take place.

A look at the medals table from the Athens Olympics reveals just how Australia have mastered sport - their haul of 17 gold medals behind only the United States, China and Russia in an Olympic family that has 200 members.

For a country of 20 million people to feature just behind the present world superpower, a country that was a superpower in the 20th century and one that is expected to become one in the 21st, shows just how competitive Australia have become in virtually every sport they turn their hand to.

One of the few countries where football is not yet king, they have even qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 1974 and have a realistic chance of reaching the knockout stages in Germany.

"Australians love sport," boasted Olympic supremo Michael Knight at the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics and how they proved it with what is widely reckoned to be the best Games in recent memory.

Melbourne, a city that itself hosted the Olympics 50 years ago, can be expected to put on just as good a show as Sydney and, even if half a century has elapsed since it staged the ultimate sporting spectacle, the Victorian city has never been far from the sporting spotlight and frequently hosts the world at sporting events as diverse as the Australian Open tennis tournament and the Melbourne Cup horse race.

Everywhere you look in the Commonwealth Games, you will find Australians in medal contention.

The two sports that most define the Commonwealth Games - like the Olympics - are athletics and swimming.

In athletics they will compete hard against powerful Caribbean sprinters and East African middle- and long-distance runners, but are expected to pick up plenty of medals.

Their well-drilled relay squads may even challenge Great Britain's Olympic gold medal-winning women or the women of the Bahamas and Jamaica who between them have won the last two Olympic 4x100 relays.

Australia are in a rebuilding phase following the retirement of Cathy Freeman but they have plenty more talented performers who will be confident of striking gold in Melbourne in front of a home audience.

Exciting prospect Craig Mottram will have high hopes for the 5000m - the event where he won the bronze medal in the World Championships in Helsinki while Benita Johnson will be fiercely competitive at the long-distance events.

Jana Pittman, Matt Shirvington, Tamsyn Lewis are also accomplished performers on the world stage who need no introduction to lovers of track and field.

In swimming, they vie for supremacy on a world level with the United States and with the Americans not competing in Melbourne that leaves the field open for Australian hegemony in the pool.

Sadly Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett will be missing, but Michael Klim, Leisel Jones, Petria Thomas and Brooke Hanson are also top-calibre performers.

The pool that will be used in Melbourne is newly constructed for the Games and will also be used for the 2007 World Championships which Melbourne has won the right to stage.

Australia's prowess will also make them a force to be reckoned with in many other sports - they have an exciting crop of cyclists and their men's and women's hockey teams - the Kookaburras and the Hockeyroos respectively - will both start as hot favourites for gold.

Even with the likes of Bradley McGee, Stuart O'Grady and Robbie McEwen absent due to the demands of the European cycling season, Australia are well on the way to producing the next generation of world-class cyclists.

England and Scotland will provide competition in the velodrome but a glut of golds should be the reward for Australia in the two-wheel game.

So it is not a question of will Australia top the table but by how much.

It is appropriate that an event that will showcase Australia's prowess in sport will take place in the legendary MCG.

The Melbourne Cricket Ground has been a site for sports for 151 years and the 107,000 people who watched the Opening Ceremony of the 1956 Olympics there was an Olympic record until 2000 when it was beaten by, naturally, Sydney.

The MCG also has a world record attendance for a cricket match - 90,000 - although its highest crowd of 121,000 was for an Australian Rules fixture.

Roared on by the inevitable "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie - oi, oi, oi" chants, the Games will merely be a coronation of Australia as the pre-eminent sporting nation in the Commonwealth which, with 1.7billion people, possesses around 30 per cent of the world's population.