With Sydney stealing its thunder, Melbourne has good reason to feel overlooked these days. The cosmopolitan capital of Victoria, once described by Mr Ron Walker, its former major events chairman, as "the epicentre of Australian sport", was after all the first Australian city to hold the Olympics back in 1956, an event commemorated by one of the few Olympic museums in the world. Located at the celebrated Melbourne Cricket Ground, the museum displays such memorabilia as the running spikes worn by Ron Delany when he won the gold medal for Ireland in the 1,500 metres. Museum official Mr Denis Maher, whose grandfather came from Tipperary, explained the city's obsession with sport.
"It goes back to the mid-1800s, during the time of the gold rush, when sport became a lifestyle," he said. "It was a way for new arrivals to be integrated into their new country, as sport makes entry into Australian culture `fast-track'. "We don't have irredentism here. We are who we are. We are happy with what we do and how we express ourselves - and Aussies express themselves through sport. It's all about giving someone a fair go. "And we invest a lot in people who represent Australia. Being isolated geographically and economically, sport is a way to compete with the rest of the world, one to one. And what Melbourne has done in sport is the stuff of legend."
The most popular game on the continent, Australian Rules football, was invented in Victoria. Based in part on Gaelic football, it was originally a way of keeping cricketers fit out of season, according to Mr Maher. But minority sport also has a huge following: tens of thousands of fans turn up for the surfing championships and water-skiing festivals. Monday's edition of the Melbourne Age is always choc-a-bloc with sports results in tiny print. Once a brash and prosperous outpost of the British Empire, Melbourne is now a gracious city of impressive stone mansions and Victorian parks, attracting immigrants from around the globe. Home to the world's largest Greek community outside Greece, it has a southern European feel, with trams and Australia's best coffee shops.
At the time it hosted the 1956 Olympics, Melbourne was the biggest and most important city in Australia. Most domestic and international companies had their headquarters here. Visiting artists, musicians, authors and business people made Melbourne their first stop. But Sydney, with its magnificent harbour and opera house, has now overtaken it as the dominant Australian metropolis. The reasons are partly economic. During the 1980s, Melbourne went into a slump. Its detractors began to refer to it as `the rust-bucket' and `bleak city'. To revive its fortunes, it made a bid for the 1996 Olympic Games and, after much bitter in-fighting in the Australian Olympic Committee, it defeated Sydney and Brisbane to become Australia's nominee.
In the end, it lost out to Atlanta, and to this day there is a suspicion in Melbourne that Australian Olympic officials who favoured Sydney were less than enthusiastic in pursuing Melbourne's claim, calculating that Sydney would succeed on the next round.
Mr Kevan Gosper, vice-president of the International Olympic Committee, who lobbied against Melbourne for the 1996 Games despite being a native son, on the grounds that the city would have difficulties getting the Games a second time, admits that the vote "produced a legacy of recriminations and ill-feeling" against him which have not been forgotten in Melbourne corporate circles. Mr Gosper recently insisted, to the disgust of most Australians, that his 11-year-old daughter, rather than the chosen Greek-Australian 15-year-old, should be the first to carry the Olympic torch from its site in Greece to Sydney.
The 1990s were a painful time for Victoria. The state went through a Thatcherite revolution under the conservative premiership of Jeff Kennett, whose war with the "pinko" Melbourne Age is the stuff of journalistic legend in Australia. Victoria has now emerged from its deep recession, but some of its new features are brash and tacky. These include the Crown Casino, the biggest in the world when it opened in 1997, with 350 gaming tables, 1,300 poker machines and 40 restaurants. The bidding process for the casino produced the memorable comment from the Labour prime minister of the time, Paul Keating, that it was "like the dead cat in the middle of the road - stinking to high heaven".
Gambling has, however, always been a major part of Melbourne's culture. Walking around the city today, it is impossible to avoid the poker machines. They are crammed into bars on every street, sucking the spare cash from the citizenry.
During the Games, Melbourne, with only a few Olympic soccer matches, has had to put on a brave face - but it is not giving up its claim to sporting status. To publicise its ability to host big events, such as the 2006 Commonwealth Games, it brought an exhibition last week right to the heart of Olympics-mad Sydney. The title? "Melbourne: Sporting Capital of the Universe."