By Scott Dougal, PA International

If British cycling fans enjoyed some tasty morsels like golds for Chris Hoy and Nicole Cooke, for their Australian counterparts the 2002 Commonwealth Games was a smorgasbord of success.

Even the numbers are mouth-watering: eight out of 11 gold medals on the track - including two in one night for Graeme Brown and three clean sweeps - two them on the road. Oh, and one world record in the team pursuit.

Australian dominance was interrupted on a few occasions - most notably on the first Sunday night when British riders roasted the opposition to secure a 1-2-3 in the kilometre time-trial.

Hoy set a new Commonwealth record as he took the top prize for Scotland while Jason Queally - who won gold in the discipline at the Sydney Olympics - and Jamie Staff won silver and bronze for England.

Those who saw Cooke win gold in the women's road race on the last Saturday could well be able to claim they saw an Olympic champion in the making.

And perhaps a joint Anglo-Scottish sprint team featuring three from Hoy, Craig McLean, Queally and former BMX world champion turned emerging track star, Staff, would have prevented one of those golds from taking a flight Down Under.

But, as brightly as some of the Britons on bikes shone, they were all but eclipsed by the Australians.

On the track, Englishmen lost three gold medal finals on three successive nights to their Australian rivals.

Bradley Wiggins was probably the most unfortunate, bettered by his Francaise des Jeux team-mate Brad McGee on the Tuesday before losing out again in the team pursuit the following night.

By Thursday, the team sprint had been turned into a grudge match by the ebullient Australian Sean Eadie who had claimed after the individual event - swept by him and his team-mates - that England's sprinters "couldn't race their way out of a one-door room".

Queally agreed but argued that the England team would benefit in the team event from their greater camaraderie.

He had a point, Australian sprint teams in the past have been riven with personal conflicts - even coming to blows at one point before the last Olympics.

Eadie himself admitted that "we're not the Brady Bunch" and Queally's words appeared to be borne out when England, the last team out, came through qualifying marginally quicker.

But it was after the Australians had raced that an insight into what drove them to success became evident.

Jobie Dajka had given the Aussies a slightly ragged look as he struggled to follow Eadie's wheel.

Although the time didn't matter as they were in the next round anyway, Dajka - bronze medallist in the individual sprint - sat in the pits head bowed as his team-mates, Eadie and Ryan Bayley, studiously ignored him.

That was at half-eleven. By six o'clock and the semi-finals - they had evidently put the glitch right as they ensured their place in the gold/silver race, beating England's time by .003 of second on the way.

And the gap was pulled out to .266 in the final as Queally discovered that superior team spirit had not been enough after all.

Afterwards, Eadie graciously conceded that any one of Australia, England and Scotland, who won bronze, could have won the gold that night.

He had a point. Britain's representatives were hardly bereft of talent but the frequency with which gold medals found their way on to green and gold shoulders over the seven days suggests that there was something else at work.

It might have been hunger. But if the British coaches could find out what happened to Dajka in the six hours between the light lunch of qualifying and the main course in the evening, we might have something to feast on come Athens and 2004.