The forthcoming Commonwealth Games in Delhi offer heady possibilities of advancement for many of the 100-strong England athletics team announced earlier this month. Any or all of the foregoing have the opportunity in India to put together a performance which makes their name in international circles.

Historically, the Commonwealth Games is an event in which a succession of English runners and jumpers have announced their talent to the wider world with an outstanding performance, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the coming competition in India will be the blossom-watch.

Four years ago in Melbourne, these Championships provided one of England’s selected runners the chance to establish themselves as a performer of the highest standard.

Christine Ohuruogu (pictured) had gone to Australia with her career already shaping up very nicely. Her domestic breakthrough had already occurred at the 2004 Olympic trials in Manchester, where she won conclusively - and much to her own apparent surprise - to secure a 400 metres place in Athens later that summer, when she performed with high credit.

Two years on, her ambitions were higher, and her remorseless will-power had been focused on overcoming the likely challenge of the then Olympic and world champion, Tonique Williams-Darling.

Ohuruogu hunted her prey down in the finishing straight, finishing the stronger. It was a performance of ominous promise - and one she repeated with the same outcome at the following year’s World Championships in Osaka and then, in 2008, at the Beijing Olympics. This October she will defend her title in India.

But Ohuruogu was not the only English athlete who looks back on the Melbourne Games as an international launching pad. The women's 1500m was won with floating acceleration by Lisa Dobriskey, who only seems to get out of breath when she starts talking after her races. The Loughborough athlete has since gone on to win a world silver medal and will be defending her Commonwealth title in India.

Also defending their title from 2006 will be Phillips Idowu, whose victory in Melbourne ended a sequence of under-performances at major championships in the wake of his highly creditable sixth place at the 2000 Olympics. Four years later, in Athens, he had failed to register a legal jump.

For Idowu, the experience of Melbourne was one of relief rather than exultation. It was an event he should have won - and he did so. It was also the precursor to four years in which he has picked up world indoor and outdoor gold, European gold and Olympic silver, and he approaches the London 2012 Games with a real chance of emulating his former rival Jonathan Edwards’s Olympic victory of 2000.

High jumper Martyn Bernard is another who established himself in international athletics with success in Melbourne, where he took silver. He has since won European indoor and outdoor bronze, and reached the last Olympic final.

While the heptathlon in Melbourne was won by the 2004 Olympic bronze medallist Kelly Sotherton, it was her English team-mate Jessica Ennis, the bronze medallist, who was to go on to higher things in the next few years.

Ennis, nicknamed "Tadpole" by Sotherton, soon became a leap-frog as she won the 2009 world title, followed this year by the world indoor and European titles.

The quintet who made the most of Melbourne were part of a rich English tradition. For instance, how about this quartet from an earlier athletics generation…

The Games of 1994, held in Victoria, Canada saw a startling performance in the heptathlon.

England had a strong tradition in this event, with Judy Simpson having won in 1986 and then taken the bronze behind 1990 winner Jane Flemming of Australia. By 1994, England’s main hopes were carried by 21-year-old Denise Lewis, but by the second day of competition the gold seemed to be between Flemming and the Canadian over whom she held a 47-point overnight lead, Catherine Bond-Mills.

But Lewis narrowed the margin by producing a 6.44 metre long jump and then, in the penultimate event of the competition, she produced one of those leaps forward which these Championships seem so often to stimulate as she improved her javelin best by more than five metres, launching the spear out to 53.68m to take overall lead going into the concluding 800m.

Needing to finish no more than 5.5 seconds adrift of Flemming to maintain her position, she rose to the challenge, finishing in a personal best of 2min 17.60sec behind the Australian, who managed 2.13.07.

Lewis’s margin of victory was just eight points, but it proved to be the first of a series of big wins - bronze at the 1996 Olympics, silver at the 1997 Worlds, gold at the 1998 European Championships and Commonwealths, silver again at the 1999 Worlds, and gold at the 2000 Olympics.

It was at the same Games in Victoria that a runner who had revived an outstanding junior career after watching one of her old rivals, Lisa York, run in the 1992 Olympics earned her first major championship title.

The runner was Kelly Holmes (pictured). And her 1500m gold would be followed by a host of medals over the next decade, culminating in the 800-1500m double at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Holmes's winning time in Victoria of 4:08.86sec may not have been world shattering, but that race marked the first international hurrah for a woman who subsequently laid claim to being one of the finest athletes in history.

Six years after her retirement from the track, Holmes is still connected with the Commonwealths by dint of being President of Commonwealth Games England.

Canada also witnessed the emergence of another historically gifted athlete in Daley Thompson - but the man who dominated the decathlon for more than a decade made his mark at the Commonwealth Games held 16 years earlier, in Edmonton.

By the end of the first day, Thompson led the field by the huge margin of 541 points thanks to wind-assisted marks of 10.50 in the 100m and 8.11m in the long jump. Despite dipping in his level of performance the next day, Thompson still won the title with 8,467 points, beating the Games record by almost 1,000 points.

A competitive career which included every title, including Olympic golds from the Moscow Games of 1980 and the Los Angeles Games of 1984 lay ahead…

Forty years before Thompson’s opening flourish came another outstanding performance by an English athlete at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Dorothy Odam was just 18 when she won what was then the British Empire Games high jump title with a height of 1.60m, equalling the Games best.

Two years earlier, Odam had taken the silver medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and after the hiatus of the Second World War she returned to action in the 1948 London Games, taking another silver, before adding a further Empire Games gold in 1950 and a silver four years later.

At the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Perth, the England team which took silver in the 4x110 yards relay, which boasted the woman who had already won both the 100 and 220 yards, Dorothy Hyman, also included Ann Packer, who, two years later, would become Olympic 800m champion (pictured).

The men’s long jump at those Games was won by Ghana’s Mike Ahey, with an effort of 8.05m, but the performance of the Welshman who took fourth place with 7.72 proved to be worth noting.

Within two years, Lynn Davies was Olympic champion, and two years after that, in the national stadium at Kingston, Jamaica, he added the British Empire and Commonwealth Games title.

Kingston also marked the start of the big time for a 22-year-old high hurdler named David Hemery, who followed his victory in the 120 yards hurdles with an Olympic 400m hurdles gold medal at the Mexico Games two years later before winning the 110m hurdles at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.

As the 19th running of the competition that has been known as the Commonwealth Games since 1978 looms ahead, England expects new names to be added to what has been established as a glorious tradition of emergence.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. He will be covering the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi for insidethegames