When Charles van Commenee meets Britain's sports journalists over a Fleet Street lunch this week doubtless he will be grilled about his apparent eagerness to promote athletes from overseas who conveniently are able to switch nationalities and compete for Team GB at the expense of some home-grown talent.

It is not something confined to athletics. Half the England cricket team sound as if they have stepped off a plane from Jo'burg. Actually most of them have.

However van Commenee could turn tables and ask whether British sport could actually survive without a little help from abroad, not just on the track and field but in preparing for the Olympics.

For he is just one of over 50 imports whose expertise has become an integral part of the games we play, and how we play them.

When Fabio Capello took charge of English football almost four years ago as a generale surrounded by Italian lieutenants, he succeeded earlier mercenary Sven-Göran Eriksson as numero uno of a foreign legion that has undertaken the biggest invasion of these shores since the Romans.

British sport is now commanded by a platoon of coaches hired overseas, all recruited in the frantic quest for Olympic glory.

My research for the Independent on Sunday has revealed that in all, at least 21 of the 26 sports in which Team GB will compete in London will have performance directors or senior coaches who have been expensively head-hunted from Australia to the Ukraine via China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Hungary, Holland, Switzerland and the United States, spanning four continents and 28 nations.


They range from Jurgen Grobler (pictured), the East German émigré who for many years has been behind the phenomenal success of British rowing, to Biz Price, the Canadian synchronised swimming Svengali now putting a smile on the face of Britain's water babes, and a Korean professor, Won Jae Moon, whose expertise has enabled British Olympic hopefuls in taekwondo to start beating his own nation's stars in the homeland which invented the sport.

Only three Olympic sports - boxing, hockey and shooting - will definitely embark on 2012 with all-British coaching set-ups. Tennis and football have yet to formulate their plans. It is likely both will have Britons in overall charge, though tennis will permit foreign coaches to work with individual players such as Andy Murray.

For the rest, Exchequer and Lottery funding distributed by UK Sport has facilitated the hiring of top quality coaches from overseas.

In all there are 52 foreigners working as coaches at various coaching levels in 21 Olympic sports (see coaches below).

Several are on six-figure salaries. Van Commenee, the Dutch disciplinarian brought in to succeed axed Briton Dave Collins as performance director is probably most handsomely rewarded, believed to earn approaching £200,000 ($319,000) a year, although his the total wage bill probably is only around half the £6 million ($9.6 million) trousered annually by Capello.

There is no doubt that most British sports have been enhanced by foreign stewardship. So while the Union Jack may be flying high over the Olympic Park just over a year from now perhaps fluttering alongside should be that of the United Nations.

Some sports are totally dominated by foreign coaches. Gymnastics has five, two from Russia and others from Ukraine, Romania and Canada working under Dutch-born technical director Eddie Van Hoof.


Britain's modern pentathletes went into last weekend's World Cup at Greenwich with Jan Bartu (pictured), an ex-Olympian who competed for Czechoslovakia, heading a coaching unit of a Hungarian, Slovakian and Swiss, while Dave Brailsford's high achieving cycling squad have coaches from Australia, Germany, Belgium and South Africa.

No other nation has such an international collection of coaches, and the man largely responsible for this is 2012 chief Sebastian Coe who declared after London won the bid six years ago: "It is very simple. If quality coaches aren't available here, you go for the best available elsewhere." His advice has been followed implicitly.

But why are good British coaches in such a minority? Why have there been no British successors to men like Coe's own father, Peter, who coached him to two Olympic gold medals? Steve Cram, a Coe contemporary, who also had a home-grown coach, Jimmy Hedley, has said: "Jimmy was the sort of bloke who'd be there every night. He gave up 50 years of his life and never received a penny. These people are not being replaced and there is a massive shortfall of professional coaches that is threatening to undermine the legacy of 2012. We need a career path for British coaches because we are not keeping pace with other countries."

So why isn't there one?

It is 16 years since Frank Dick stepped out of the athletics arena, quitting as Britain's national coaching guru after the most illustrious spell the sport has known. He overlorded an inspired era when all that glittered on the track really did turn to gold - from Coe, Cram, Ovett and Thompson through to Christie, Jackson and Gunnell.


Dick (pictured),70, president of the European Coaches Association and chair of Scottish Athletics, believes Britain does not take coaching seriously enough as a profession and that his own sport failed to prepare thoroughly enough for the future. And he fears some sports could go into decline when the Olympic cash runs out after 2012 and they are unable to continue paying for overseas aid.

He says: "There has been an extraordinary negligence in developing our own coaches stretching back 20 years and it has now become that little bit sexier to bring in someone with a foreign accent. But if you do that you need a strategy to support it. You must make sure that when they move on you have people to replace them from within our own ranks.

"I was very lucky because I had some exceptional coaches around me, but they were not young, and that's the nub of the problem. There is a dearth of good young coaches. It seems to me we have lost a generation somewhere and if you want to fill in that gap by bringing in foreign coaches you must be able to ensure that they are able to influence and develop home coaching talent. You need coaching apprentices like the American system."

But are British coaches willing to look, listen and learn? Dick recalls: "As a young coach myself I remember travelling from Edinburgh, crossing the Channel, then taking a train all the way to Budapest, simply to stand outside the warm-up areas to watch what was happening. How many are prepared to do that today?"

He adds: "We also seem to have a growing confusion about who is running the show these days. We have people out there called performance directors and managers, we have coaches and all sorts of specialists and it does seem to me that they disconnect. We must join up the dots and not just be looking for short term success."

"To be fair to UK Sport they've run a World Class Coaching scheme trying to give an elite coaching experience to home grown coaches. That will certainly be necessary because I cannot see the majority of sports being able to maintain so many foreign coaches when the caravan moves on after 2012 because of the economic downturn. Unfortunately many sports do not have a Plan B.

"Basically we have said to our coaches, you are not good enough so, we are bringing in coaches from abroad. But when the money is not there are we going to turn to those same coaches we have rejected and expect them to work for less money?"

Decathlon champion Daley Thompson was among the top athletes coached by Dick. "With his charisma and knowledge he would be a great coach, but they didn't' seem to want him," he said.

Thompson, part of the team that helped secure the 2012 Olympics for London, is one of many former Olympic and world gold medallists who have been shunned or put off coaching by the increasing bureaucracy.

"There's so much red tape and paper work," he says. "The second biggest resource to talent in athletics is experience. Yet over the last 15 years that experience has simply been wasted. Just look at the world-class athletes Britain has produced over the years, guys like Seb Coe, Steve Cram and Steve Ovett, yet none are involved in coaching. I would be more than happy to help the national cause. I've never been asked."

"Coaches have always had problems with the blazerati who don't like their noses put out of joint," argues Tom McNab, one of Dick's predecessors. "Consequently we have not created that core of tough, hard-bitten professional coaches which is why we have had to import them. Men like Bill Sweetenham who came from Australia to give swimming the kick up the arse it needed and changed its culture.

"There have been many good British coaches in the past, people like Wilf Paish and Denis Watts up in the north, but where are their successors? Sadly in so many sports there is a vacuum."

British Swimming's chief executive David Sparkes is more sanguine about the future of coaching here: "I believe in swimming we have some potentially world class young coaches coming through who are being helped by our foreign coaches. We train around 12,000 instructors and coaches a year and need 20,000 to meet the demand. But Britain does need more coherent financial investment in coaching at all levels."

Dick adds: "Coaching has been badly neglected and must be made a much more attractive career. The biggest single legacy we can pass on to the world through the London Olympics is how we lead, how we coach and how we can change the sporting world to make it a better place. We have this influx of foreign expertise, so for goodness sake make sure that when that flame goes down in 2012 we have a very serious legacy to pass on to the future of sport."

But by then how many British coaches will have missed the bus?

Britain's Foreign Legion

Aquatics
Swimming
Performance dir: Michael Scott (Australia)
Head coach: Dennis Pursey (USA)

Diving: Alexie Evangulov (Russia)

Synch swimming: Biz Price (Canada)

Water polo
Men: Cristian Lordache (Romania)
Women: Szilveszter Fekete (Hungary)

Athletics: Charles Van Commenee (Holland)

Archery: Lloyd Brown (USA)

Badminton
Performance dir: Jens Grill (Denmark)
Head Coach: Kenneth Jonassen (Denmark)

Basketball: Chris Spice (Australia)

Canoeing
Head coach: Brendan Purcell (Australia)
Men: Alex Nikonorov (Ukraine)
Women: Miklos Simon (Hungary)
Slalom: Jurg Gotz (Switzerland)

Cycling
Performance mgr:Shane Sutton (Australian)
Sprint: Jan van Eijden (German)
BMX: Grant White (Australian)
Carer: Luc de Wilde (Belgian)
Carer: Hanlie Perry (South Africa)

Equestrian
Eventing: Yogi Breisner (Sweden)
Show jumping mgr: Rob Hoekstra (Holland)

Fencing: Ziemiek Wojciechowski (Poland)

Gymnastics: Andrei Popov (Russia)
Assisted by: Sergei Sizhanov (Russia) and Alex Shyraev (Ukraine)
Women: Adrian Stan (Romania) and Carol Orchard (Canada)
Technical dir: Eddie Van Hoof (Holland)

Handball: Dragan Djukic (Serbia)
Assisted by: Jure Sterbucl (Slovenia) and Rolf Dobler (Switzerland)
Women head: Jesper Holmris (Denmark)
Assisted by: Vigdis Holmeset (Norway)

Judo: Patrick Roux (France)
Assisted by: Aurelien Brussal (France), Tsuyoshi Tsunoda (Japan) and Yuko Nakano (Japan)

Modern Pentathlon
Performance dir: Jan Bartu (Czech Rep)
Women head: Istvan Nemeth (Hungary)
Men head: Philipp Waeffler (Switzerland)

Fencing: Frici Foldes (Slovakia)

Rowing
Men: Jurgen Grobler (Germany)
Women: Paul Thompson (Australia)

Sailing
Men 470 perf coach: Morgan Reeser (USA)
Women match racing: Maurice Parden-Kooper (Holland)

Table Tennis
Mens: Jia-Yi-Liu (China)

Taekwondo: Prof Won Jae Moon (Korea)

Triathlon: Ben Bright (New Zealand)

Weightlifting: Tamas Feher (Hungary)

Volleyball: Harry Brokking (Holland)

Wrestling: Nikolai Kornyeyev (Ukraine)

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.