And then he came back and beat a strong field by such a wide margin as to be almost ridiculous.

The senior Brownlee, aged 24, romped home in Kitzbuehel 50 seconds ahead of his 22-year-old brother, Jonny, and more than a minute in front of third-place Javier Gomez, the Spaniard who once ruled men's triathlon before the Brownlees ruined his fun.

How he must curse them. He has trained with them, raced alongside them for a French domestic team, gone up against them many times. They get along well. But they have taken his sport and moved it beyond the reach of Gomez or, for that matter, anyone else who cares to try.

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Alistair Brownlee beats brother Jonny in Kitzbuehel one-two

"Those guys are above the rest. Nobody is going to get near them," their domestique, Stuart Hayes, told us having crossed the Kitzbuehel finish line. Hayes and the Brownlees make up the men's Olympic team for Britain this summer, with the former employed as a domestique for the latter.

He took to that role admirably in Austria, riding on the front of the pack and controlling the pace after the Brownlees' early break had been caught. Jonny admitted Hayes' presence had made their lives much easier - allowed the brothers to rest and regroup while preventing any of their rivals from breaking clear.

But would they have won anyway had Hayes not been there? The gut answer is: probably. If only because it has been such a long time since a Brownlee did not win a major triathlon.

This sounds like hyperbole but the facts sustain it. In the last 12 months, Alistair has won all six major Olympic-distance races he has entered: six World Series events and the European Championships. In a spell stretching from May 2009, he has won 12 of the 15 World Series races he started. When he missed this year's Madrid and San Diego races through his torn Achilles tendon, Jonny won them instead.

Even knowing the training Alistair had missed and the undoubted setback of his injury, secretly, it was hard not to expect this victory in Kitzbuehel; hard not to start forming the opening paragraphs of a 'Brownlee wins comeback' story while he was still out on the bike. It felt inevitable to watching journalists, let alone triathletes in the act of being punished.

Last year we saw it at the European Championships. Alistair had briefly worn a protective boot around one foot that spring, too - not as bad an injury but still not ideal - and then he turned up in Spain, took a puncture in the ride, was brought back to the pack by his team-mates while Jonny slowed things down at the front, and in the end he won comfortably.

No matter what you throw at Alistair Brownlee, it does not stick. What a psychological dampener that must cast over everyone else in the field. Here's a man who spent the first half of 2012 entirely missing in action: he comes back for his first race and takes the world's top 50 to triathlon school.

How can he and Jonny possibly be beaten at London 2012?

Kitzbuehel: Another podium shared between the Brownlee brothers. Photo: Getty Images

Don't misunderstand, there are clearly many ways in which that Olympic race in Hyde Park can finish without a Brownlee on the podium, let alone winning the title. Injury, illness, misfortune, all the devils that lap at any Olympian's heels.

But what can their rivals do? What plan can they realistically come up with?

If they go out hard from the very start, the Brownlees are highly unlikely to be too far behind them after the swim, and with the help of Hayes they will surely gobble up anyone who attempts to simply go out at maximum speed on the bike and stay there. Then the race is theirs to control.

Try to get in a breakaway with the Brownlees on the bike and they will keep you there, use you as a domestique whle you take your turn on the front, then spit you out on the run. In Kitzbuehel, Alistair exploded into the run with such a turn of pace that he left a dozen world-class opponents, all in transition alongside him, for dead.

Maybe you could team up with a few other triathletes and launch break after break on the bike to wear the brothers out. But the Brownlees work together too effectively - they manipulate the peloton, regulating its pace, deciding its strategy. Can you outwit them? In an Olympic race where international alliances are nothing like as easily forged as a sibling bond?

There are probably many other tricks left in triathlon's book - by all means name some in the comments, Gomez and co will be grateful. But the world has seen each of the brothers win alone, win together, and now win with Hayes thrown in for good measure. It feels like they will have an answer.

Any lingering doubts that Alistair Brownlee will start the London 2012 triathlon as the favourite are gone. Now, we may see the shortest odds on a British one-two in Olympic history.

Britain will send a huge number of athletes to London 2012 but, for each athlete picked, others must tell family, friends and sponsors that they did not make it.

All the recent grief over Olympic selection has been well-publicised, chiefly world number one Aaron Cook's omission from the GB taekwondo team, leading some to wonder why things are so much worse this year than before any other Games.

In some respects, they aren't. Appeals are a fact of life ahead of any Olympics but this year's have gained more coverage because a home Games is on the horizon, which also accounts for the fact that some of the battles are more bitterly contested: the prize is that much greater, both psychologically and financially with sponsors showing great interest in sports they would never normally touch.

Aaron Cook (right) was controversially not selected by British Taekwondo. Photo: Getty

"Normally, it's not as public as it is now," agrees Liz Nicholl, the chief executive of UK Sport. Nicholl and her colleagues distribute the millions of pounds in funding to each of Britain's Olympic sports teams, so they take an interest in every selection decision made to see where their money goes. UK Sport even invests in Sport Resolutions, the independent body designed to oversee selection appeals.

"This is very high-profile and it's a difficult one - many of the sports we're talking about don't have a huge number of professionals working with them to manage the circumstances that evolve around this, particularly with media interest. It's difficult for the athletes and a very emotive time for them."

Host-nation places are where things most frequently turn sour. At the Olympics the hosts are always given many more places than usual as a reward for staging the Games. The problem is, the athletes going for these places are the ones who did not reach the Olympics on merit (otherwise they wouldn't need them) - so subjective decisions must be made, and arguments ensue.

"We had been told that if we were going to the Olympics, we would get a phone call on the Friday morning - and if not, we wouldn't," says fencer Jon Willis, who was relying on a host-nation place in the men's epee tournament for his ticket to London 2012.

"I was travelling to Stockholm for a competition that weekend, so I had my phone turned off on the flight on Friday morning.

"I got there, turned my phone on, and no message had been left. It was heartbreak in the baggage reclaim hall."

Willis has now announced his retirement, after an unsuccessful appeal in which he argued that British Fencing performance director Alex Newton had been biased against him.

The two have not had the easiest relationship and Willis felt that, even though he did not reach the Games on merit, his record outshone those of several fencers selected ahead of him.

"For 12 months, for me, it's been clear that I was never in the plans. I was dropped from funding a year ago," he says.

"Alex Newton never made any attempt to get to know me. She never bothered coming to visit me [at a training centre in Germany] to see what I do, she never asked to see my training diary, she couldn't tell you anything about me.

"It's like I was discarded from the very start and I'll never understand that. But [at the appeal] how do you prove someone has it in for you? You can't do it. I've got my opinions and I'm sure she's got hers, but she'll deny it every time. 'I've got no problem with Jon, I put the data to the selectors.' What can I say to that?"

That is, indeed, exactly how Newton - who joined British Fencing at the start of 2011 - sees it. She has had more than Willis to deal with, too. Five fencers have launched unsuccessful appeals and an online forum has been alive with criticism of her panel's Olympic selections, particularly young sabre fencer Sophie Williams, picked ahead of the more experienced Jo Hutchison.

Last month, The Times ran an article in which it was suggested Williams may owe her selection to her father being a prominent sponsor of the sport in Britain.

"I'm really sad for Sophie," says Newton, "for the negative press and comments about her. We should be celebrating a 21-year-old, someone for the future, who could perform as well as any of the other athletes.

"I'm not surprised people are disappointed that some athletes were not selected, but I am surprised they are taking it out on other athletes. Is it Sophie's fault? No. Has it knocked her confidence? Wouldn't it knock yours if you had a half-page spread in The Times saying your dad bought your place?

"I went on the forum and had a read of it. In the job I've got, you've got to develop a very, very thick skin. I don't like being called some of the names but it comes with the territory."

Host-nation places aren't the only source of rancour. Lucy Hall knows how Sophie Williams feels even though she competes in triathlon, a sport in which Britain earned its six places at the Games on merit alone.

But the selectors could still decide who from the squad took up those places and Hall, 20, was picked ahead of several contenders with much more experience of top-level triathlon.

British Triathlon wanted Hall to do a specific job. Her fast swim and strong skills on the bike make her an ideal candidate to perform as a domestique to GB's world number one, Helen Jenkins, helping Jenkins to victory.

"They made it very clear that I would be going to the Games to help Helen," she says. "I know I'm not a fast enough runner to go individually."

News of the selectors' phone calls to various triathletes soon leaked out online, while some of those involved confronted each other during training. Not everyone felt Hall had earned her place.

"It's controversial and some people aren't happy about it but unfortunately none of the other girls hit the selection criteria and I'm there to do a job," says Hall.

"I think they are fantastic athletes, and it's a really difficult situation - they are very upset. I can sympathise with that. Hopefully nobody has taken it personally, they know I'm not the head of selection. Sport is cruel, it really is."

Will Clarke was one of the triathletes overlooked. He feels he had comfortably marked himself out as the third-best male triathlete in Britain behind the all-conquering Brownlee brothers (GB receives three triathlon places per gender at the Games), but Stuart Hayes was selected as the Brownlees' domestique instead.

Clarke's argument is that he and other leading triathletes have given their careers towards reaching London 2012 but have had scant reward for years at the top level. He feels the selection policy set the bar unrealistically high and, when none of GB's second-tier triathletes cleared it, unfairly handed the likes of Hall a chance without proving themselves on the world stage.

He was with top female GB triathlete Liz Blatchford when both received the calls to say they would not make the team.

"Liz was really upset and so was [fellow triathlete] Jodie Stimpson," recalls Clarke. "I think they feel they've been screwed over a bit, pretty betrayed. I'm sure Lucy Hall is the most fortunate Olympian out there.

"It was pretty emotional. There were a few tears kicking around. The goalposts kept on getting moved as to what I had to do to qualify, it was a really bad system. The team was basically picked around the Brownlees and Helen Jenkins and we had no chance to qualify in our own right, it was made too hard."

Now, Clarke and several similarly overlooked colleagues are planning to strike out for the Ironman triathlon circuit, largely based in the United States, as something to take their minds off their Olympic disappointment. Clarke says he could come back for Rio 2016, but only if he knows he has a strong chance of selection.

"I think relationships within British triathlon will be a bit rough and there'll be a lot of bitchiness out there," says Clarke. "It will change things, it will be hard for a while."

For Willis, the journey is over and he is finding it hard not to hold a grudge.

"I can't be two-faced about it," he says. "I can't be nice to somebody who I think has ended my fencing career and stamped out my dream. I can do my best to be civil, but why would I want to spend any more time than I have to?

"I think this will be a divided GB team. I hope it won't be, I hope somehow we'll all be friends, but this was always going to be the problem. I don't see how it can be a happy camp."

Newton defends the process and looks ahead. "The winners are obviously happy and the losers are obviously unhappy, but we have a genuine agreement that we need to work together and support each other," she concludes.

"I've always said host-nation places would be a double-edged sword with so much at stake. We could easily get sidetracked by the noise and distractions, and lose focus. It's been a tough time.

"Come Rio 2016, there won't be host-nation places: you qualify on merit, or you don't go. These places are gifts to athletes who have not qualified, and it's a home Games - any athlete wants to go. Don't we all?"

In a field outside Rome, after years of frustration, perspiration and pure hope on the fringes of the Olympic movement, she has taken a giant step towards her ultimate dream: a puppy named Donald.

Spence, 26, should top your list of athletes you'd pick to cross a finish line first. It's how she reacts. Her emotions sit squarely on the surface even at the quietest of times but here in Italy, moments ago, she has won a world title and nobody needs to ask, "How do you feel?"

Hauled off the floor by wide-eyed coaching staff, she is dragged, gurgling with "Oh-my-God" ecstasy, past a crowd of well-wishers until she finds some open space and words break through.

"I'm going to the Olympic Games! I can't believe it, I can't... Oh my God... My dream has come true." She gulps back sobs. "It's so cheesy, but it's true." With that, she collapses into the arms of the British performance director.

Mhairi Spence's wild world title celebration

Women's modern pentathlon became an Olympic sport at Sydney 2000, where Steph Cook won gold for Britain. Since then Team GB has picked up medals at both Athens and Beijing. Getting into such a high-quality Olympic team is incredibly difficult because, with just two GB places available, a medal at these World Championships was the only sure way to do it.

Realistically, nobody thought that likely. The current crop of Brits is a good one, but other nations are strong. Heading into the day's grand finale, a combination of running and shooting to decide the winner, France's Amelie Caze held a whopping 37-second head start over third-placed Spence.

Somehow, Caze threw it away. Somehow, Spence held off everyone to cross the line first. Somehow, team-mate Samantha Murray - capping an explosive surge up pentathlon's ranks in the last 12 months - won the bronze medal, booking her own ticket to London 2012.

These successes stunned the British team and vindicated both athletes. Spence and Murray have been eaten up by their sport in the past, spat out, told they couldn't cut it. Spence missed the Beijing Olympics and, as recently as 2010, wasn't even in the World Championships team. Murray was kicked off the development programme - "she couldn't cope," her coaches say - but refused to let that be the last word. Now, they're high-fiving on a world championship podium.

Jan Bartu, Britain's performance director, has seen their stories evolve. He holds up his mobile phone to video the medal ceremony, as though the recording will make this more believable. In his wildest dreams? He shakes his head.

"Since Mhairi joined us in Bath, it's always been: is she going to make it? Will she become a top-class athlete?" Bartu recalls.

"This is what we live for, this transformation of her as a person and athlete. It's a fantastic story. What she's done in the past 18 months - her individual effort, her nutrition programme, sports psychology - this is the dream outcome of that effort."

The Scot, whose mother makes kilts, was well on the way to that transformation a year ago at the Olympic test event in Greenwich Park. When we spoke there, she could feel things clicking into place.

"I thought I'd reached my limit, but I seem to have found a new gear," she said then. "I've grown up. I've matured. I'm more professional than I was. I have to take this a little bit more seriously.

"I'm a fun-loving, jokey person a lot of the time, but I realised my days were becoming numbered in the squad and in my athletic career. I had to change something."

Spence changed many things - chiefly her diet and training regime - but one thing remained intact: her sense of humour. She will easily be the happiest and chirpiest member of Team GB for London 2012.

"I'm a more mature person than I used to be... most of the time," she said in Greenwich. "There are still moments. It's trying to find that balance of training professionally and still being able to let your hair down. Hopefully people still think I'm amusing. If not, I'd better sort it out."

Saturday's phenomenal outcome closed as many doors as it opened - Spence and Murray may be in, but team-mates Freyja Prentice and Beijing 2008 silver medallist Heather Fell are out, their hopes for a home Olympics sliced apart in the space of 10 minutes as they finished a dozen places further back.

Bartu sympathises but points out: "That's sport. There are winners and losers."

And one of the winners is Murray, 22 years old, who a decade earlier put a poster of Sydney champion Cook on her wall and vowed to be like her hero. Bartu believes Murray's 12-month rise to world bronze "defies all theories and statistics".

Murray, still emotional long after the race is over, tells us: "This is a dream I've made a reality, and that I've worked hard for. It's complete satisfaction, I'm just so proud.

"When I was 12, I saw that poster of Steph Cook and I knew I wanted an Olympic medal. I believed in myself every step of the way, I had to, throughout everything. I had to keep believing."

As tears began to form again in the fading evening light, she paid tribute to a team-mate who knows all about maintaining belief, and who will be confirmed alongside her in the London Olympic team next month.

"If there's one person," said Murray, "who you can look at every day of the week, look up to and think, 'If I want to get anywhere in life that's how I've got to work,' it's Mhairi Spence."

It takes the shape of Campbell Walsh, Athens 2004 silver medallist and Hounslow's big rival for the one place available to a Briton in the men's kayak at London 2012.

Ten feet below Hounslow's vantage point on the banks of the Olympic canoe slalom course, Walsh is paddling for dear life. Hounslow took 95.76 seconds to complete his run. Walsh has to beat that. About 15 seconds from now, the dream dies for one of them.

"Walsh's split time is on fire!" roars the commentator. Hounslow rolls his eyes and grimaces. Walsh, four years Hounslow's senior at the age of 34, barrels on past him, mere metres from the finish.

And then it's over, Walsh slumped back in his kayak and Hounslow rooted to the spot. Four unbearable seconds elapse before the time is announced.

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Watch the joy and despair of Britain's Olympic canoe slalom trials

"Campbell Walsh, 95.85 seconds... and into second place."

By nine hundredths of a second - far less than the blink of an eye - Richard Hounslow becomes an Olympian. As Hounslow is lost in a tide of embraces, Walsh lobs his paddle through a graceful arc into the swirling water and lets out a loud, resigned expletive.

This same scene is borne out four times over as the boats Britain will send to the Olympic Games are decided in the most brutal of fashions: three races over three days, down the London Olympic course. Win two, and you're in.

"One of the biggest things that puts a smile on my face is seeing how happy my family and friends are," says Hounslow. "For months they've been talking about the Olympics. To have done the job this weekend, for myself but also for them, is amazing.

"We've been thinking about this weekend for four years. When you do all the interviews and people talk about the Olympics you're like, 'Well, yeah, it'd be great but I've got to get there.'

"The media attention has been on Campbell, as it should be - he's got a good pedigree, an Olympic silver medal, a European title and multiple world medals. But I knew I had a good race head on me. At the big events I can pull the results out, and hopefully I'll do that this summer at the Olympics."

Walsh, to his credit, takes barely five minutes to gather himself before presenting a composed and philosophical front for the cameras.

"That Olympic spot was entirely my motivation," he says, matter-of-factly. "I had no thoughts past this weekend. This was the focus. But this is the way these races work: you've got to win the races, and I didn't win the races.

"I've not really experienced this too much, I've generally been pretty successful and done what I wanted. It's a new experience for me to miss out on Olympic selection when I was capable of getting it."

At least Walsh has been to an Olympics or two in the past. Louise Donington, 27, has been paddling since the age of nine. She has never made the Games. This time, she is half a second off as Lizzie Neave wins the women's kayak place instead.

"It's the fact it was so close," says Donington, swallowing hard and clearly fighting back tears, moments after realising she won't go to London 2012. The last four years, and arguably her entire career, were spent building up to this moment.

"I almost had it today. That's all I can think about. I'm trying to take the positives, knowing I was good enough and that a bit here and there would have done it, but it's challenging to deal with right now.

"It has to be like this, though. This is the pressure and environment we need to prepare for the Olympics: to listen to the commentary at the start line and know what you have to do. That's what it will be like for Lizzie at the Olympics, that's what she needs to practise."

Commendable clarity of thought from somebody who started the day an Olympic hopeful and will now, as of five minutes ago, be watching it on TV like everyone else. Not all who missed out could put that misery into words - some simply broke down in quiet corners of the course, sobbing into friends' shoulders.

"There is no failure in life," says Jurg Gotz, the British canoe slalom head coach, in his thick, sing-song Swiss accent. Having asked Gotz how his athletes should deal with missing the Olympics, the answer that comes back is surprising, not least because it segues into a Churchill quote.

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm - I think Churchill said that," he continues. "I usually go to the athletes, establish eye contact, and tell them they are as good as they were before.

"There is only one winner, and they all accept that. It is part of the business. You keep your head up."

Campbell Walsh, pictured battling for Olympic selection on the Lee Valley course. Team-mate Richard Hounslow won the race and the Olympic place. Photo: Getty Images

The five who will paddle for Britain this summer - Neave in the kayak; Beijing 2008 silver medallist David Florence, Tim Baillie and Etienne Stott in the canoe events; Hounslow in both - can now for the first time start to grapple with a home Olympics, without any 'subject to selection' asterisk.

"Since the Beijing Games finished, I've wanted to go to my home Olympic Games in London. Until this weekend, I didn't know I would be," says Florence, in a room buried beneath the course, several hours after racing finished. Interviews and a lengthy stop at doping control have turned this into a successful but draining day. Everybody else has gone home.

"There's a lot of expectation on me this time," adds the 29-year-old. "Last time, I'd never been to the Olympics and I was insignificant as far as the media were concerned. This time, having won silver last time, loads of people expected me to turn up here and do it no worries. It's not that simple.

"To compete at an Olympic selection didn't excite me: there is so much to lose. But at the Olympics? There's a huge amount to win."

Dedicated to the memory of Randy Starkman, Olympic sports reporter for Canadian newspaper the Toronto Star, who died on Monday aged 51. He understood better than most these personal triumphs and disasters with which athletes in Olympic sports must routinely contend, and reported faithfully on them at no fewer than 12 Olympic Games. He was, and remains, the most respected in his field.

The BBC Sports Personality of the Year, holder of the Tour de France green jersey, road cycling world champion and likely contender for Britain's first medal of the London Olympics now has another priority in this, the busiest of years: tiny Delilah Grace Cavendish.

Daddy Cav tweeted the big announcement, wasting no time in proclaiming it the "happiest day of my life". Mum, former glamour model Peta Todd, added she had "started that birth malarkey at 6am" but praised her other half as "incredible" throughout.

Keeping professional focus at this most personal of times is going to be quite the challenge for Cavendish. Most new fathers probably find that's a full-time occupation, without the British public expecting you to win an Olympic gold medal and Tour de France honours before your child has reached four months old. But Cavendish has known his priorities all along.

Cavendish raced in the Milan-San Remo classic a fortnight before the birth of daughter Delilah. Photo: Getty Images

"It doesn't matter what I have achieved or could achieve in future on the bike," he told me recently. "I'm going to be a dad, and when April comes nothing is going to be quite as important as that.

"Everything is prepared, the nursery's done, she's got enough clothes for a few months.

"She's kicking. We know she's a person, and it just warms you. I want to hold her, cuddle her - something that's me, that I've made. It's a feeling that nothing else in life ever comes close to."

Delilah's name was kept a closely guarded secret, even from family members. As Cavendish explained, someone always knows an idiot (he chose a stronger word) with the same name that you picked, so why share it till you have to?

If the name was an easy enough dilemma to resolve, it's fair to say Cavendish has yet to turn his attention to all the longer-term consequences of parenthood. The nervous grin and widening of the eyes when we mentioned things like choosing schools, setting aside money for university fees and so on, told its own story.

"I don't want to think about it," he squirmed, scratching his neck awkwardly. "I'll just deal with her up to being a teenager. Once she turns teenage, it's a different matter."

But Mark, you're going to have to have 'the chat' about boys and all that...

"No, don't. Don't. We're not going to talk about this. I'll just deal with my little baby girl and that'll be it.

"She's like her mum, she's got long legs. It'll be like Russian dolls - a big one and a little one. I'm really happy."

Cavendish and Todd seem like they will make fun, lively and loving parents from their constant conversations and asides on Twitter. There you will find regular glimpses of daily life in the Cavendish household.

But professional road cycling will not allow expectant fathers to linger around the home, popping along to parenthood classes and leafing lazily through catalogues while waiting for the paint in the nursery to dry. Cavendish has been out earning a crust, touring the Middle East and Europe with Team Sky.

For much of the year, contact with heavily pregnant Peta has been via a laptop screen. The same will have to happen for vast chunks of the summer to come. And for her part Todd has become a cycling expert, propped up in front of live coverage on TV.

"She's good, isn't she," said Cavendish. "I've seen her commentating on races on Twitter, she knows her stuff now. I'm impressed of her and proud of her with that.

"We spend a lot of time on Facetime and Skype, and that's kind-of good, it keeps you in your room and relaxed. Rod Ellingworth [Cavendish's coach at Team Sky and his mentor for many years] has always said to me that my most important thing is a good home life.

"I haven't been chilled for the last couple of years - certainly before the last year - but now, finally, everything is settled and going good. I'd rather be at home but I've got a job to do and if I can sit with my family on a screen and kind-of interact, I'm as relaxed as I can be.

"But it's hard. It's incredible how, naturally, something in your mind changes. I think any dad can appreciate what I'm saying. Evolution changes you. Even now, every single decision I make is not about myself any more. Consciously and subconsciously, there's always the future of my family involved in it. Everything I do affects the future of my baby girl."

Dad could be an Olympic champion by the end of July, although that will be the last thing in his mind for a while to come. At least he'll have one more fan by the roadside - Locog need to make room on Box Hill.

"She already gets excited," said Cavendish of Delilah. "When I'm racing, she's kicking. She'll be there at this year's Tour, and at the Olympic Games. That'll be a nice way to start a life."

On Monday an independent arbitrator found in favour of the gymnasts, delivering a verdict noteworthy for its devastating assessment of governing body British Gymnastics' "inconsistent, cut-and-paste" selection policy.

From the arbitrator's account of what both sides had to say, it is hard to argue with his decision. The gymnasts contended that, in a crucial three-day Olympic test event, British Gymnastics never really told them their window to hit a target score only extended to the first two days. The full 16-page verdict suggests the selection document fell well short of making this explicit. It does not say the rhythmic gymnasts' interpretation was correct, merely that the document is ambiguous enough to support the conclusion they reached.

While for many the end result is the right one, some of the detail remains underwhelming. There were a number of opportunities for the team to discover that day two was deadline-day, ahead of the fateful hour. How did they miss them all?

Riding a wave - Britain's rhythmic gymnasts at their January test event, before the dire nature of their Olympic predicament became apparent. Photo: Getty Images

Speaking over the phone on Monday once the verdict had been announced, Sarah Moon - the team's coach - said she and her gymnasts had simply "read and understood the policy to mean the entire test event" rather than the first two days.

And if you read the policy, its wording is confusing enough to support that. But this supposes there was absolutely no verbal, or other written, communication between British Gymnastics senior management and the coach and team on this issue. No meetings to clarify targets? No informal chat about the big day coming up? No text messages, even?

If it's true that the lone communication between team and bosses was this copy of the written selection policy, you could be forgiven for finding that alarming. It implies the team existed in a near-vacuum within their own sport.

Beyond that, what about media coverage? Reporters in the arena were 100% certain that day two was the cut-off point. We had been told this well in advance by British Gymnastics and articles published prior to and during the event, both in the national press and online, reflected that.

Most of the British rhythmic gymnastics team have followed me on Twitter since we first met in December last year, and I tweeted fairly relentlessly on this front for a good couple of days before the test event. Granted, nobody reads every tweet in their stream, but the team members were active on Twitter at the time. Between the seven women in the squad, their coach and their families, even allowing for everybody's focus before the event, it is surprising that not one saw a tweet, or read an article, and thought it strange that the media's interpretation of their week ahead did not remotely match their own.

This is not to accuse anybody on the team of being anything other than truthful. Brian Hutchison, father to gymnast Lynne, went on the BBC's News Channel late on Monday to point out that the entire family had paid for tickets to day three, with all the consequent travel and accommodation costs. His argument is there would be little point in that outlay if you knew the result that day to be meaningless.

On the other side of the coin, it is similarly odd that British Gymnastics did not pick up, in the weeks prior to the event, even one hint that its rhythmic gymnastics team were harbouring an interpretation of the selection policy so far removed from the governing body's intention. Would you not check this?

These incredibly hard-working teenagers are self-funded in a sport with little or no history of elite competition in the UK. They are not daft - they have always come across as industrious, bright, alert and determined to succeed. How could they and their coach have reached a major international event, one on which their entire Olympic bid hinged, with an understanding of their circumstances which differed so vastly from the truth?

On the day itself, after the fateful score - 0.273 marks below the target - had appeared on the O2 Arena's giant scoreboard, the team were whisked away into a private area behind large, black curtains. They were joined by their head of delegation, Tim Jones, one of British Gymnastics' most senior figures and a man who knew this was, indeed, curtains for the rhythmic gymnasts' Olympic hopes. The arbitrator noted he had held a meeting with members of senior management that morning with the express purpose of confirming that this was the team's last chance.

Five minutes later, all of them - including Jones - emerged from behind those curtains in tears, to face the media. Nobody has yet explained what happened in the intervening minutes, though Jones was unavailable for interview when we asked on Monday.

The team insist they did not discover the discrepancy over dates until they were being interviewed in the mixed zone. Accepting that, does this mean Jones did not say a word behind the scenes in those five minutes? This seems odd, considering he was adamant in the mixed zone moments later that the team could not possibly go to the Games. This is a point you would want to make clear prior to the gymnasts facing the media.

British Gymnastics' chief executive, Jane Allen, admitted to BBC Sport on Monday that despite six weeks of introspection in the ensuing appeals process, she still did not know what had happened behind those curtains as the confusion reached an agonising climax.

"I have no idea as to what happened when they were taken from public view. I was sitting in the stands as other people were, I was watching the event and then watching the score come up," she said.

As the BBC conducted interviews with the team, they were crying even as they told us they would fight on during day three, which we knew to be impossible under the briefing British Gymnastics had given us. Why the tears if they believed they had an extra day to get that score?

Tears from the GB gymnasts even as they finish their day two routine. When were they told this was supposedly their last chance? Photo: Getty Images

"We thought we had the two opportunities to get the score but amongst ourselves we'd set the target of achieving it in the first part of the competition, because obviously we wanted to get it done and dusted," explains coach Moon.

"When we didn't get it in the first part, the team were upset for themselves - the training had gone so, so well the whole previous week, but they knew themselves when they came off that it wasn't a good routine.

"They then saw the score and were like, 'Oh no, that's one of our chances completely gone.' Immediately some of the girls were saying, 'Alright, it's fine, we've got tomorrow.' They were telling the girls that were crying to stop.

"Unfortunately, later that evening we were told: 'No, that's it.'"

Did Tim Jones say anything in those five minutes behind the curtain? "No. It wasn't until we spoke in the mixed zone that we realised."

For many reasons this verdict is a cause for celebration: on the evidence presented, the correct decision has been reached. British Gymnastics has borne the findings with good grace - Allen adds there will be no internal "witch-hunt" in the aftermath, despite the faulty document - and the arbitrator took time to acknowledge that the governing body acted in good faith at all times. The gymnasts maintained the most professional and dignified of images in the public throughout an emotionally trying and uncertain period.

However, that this level of calamity - at the most vital and damaging moment in these gymnasts' careers - could be solely the product of one badly worded document reflects poorly on all those involved, suggests a total absence of communication, and remains difficult to adequately explain.

The problem is, all is not well. Britain may have both the current world champions in Alistair Brownlee and Helen Jenkins, but Brownlee is injured. He recently tore his Achilles tendon.

For younger brother Jonny, world champion in the shorter sprint triathlon and world number two to Alistair over the Olympic distance, this means the temporary loss of his training partner. The world's top two male triathletes - Britons, and brothers - have had their preparations disrupted at a crucial moment.

Yet such is their dominance that this has happened before, to very little effect. Alistair Brownlee sat out the opening months of the 2010 season with a stress fracture, then came back to win two world series races.

In 2011, a heel problem at the start of the year cleared up in time for him to win the European Championships despite suffering a puncture during the race, with Jonny second. They crossed the line moments apart, far in advance of the field. Brownlee won in Hyde Park and Beijing that year en route to the world title ahead of his brother.

Problems at the start and victories at the end seemed to characterise each season. Will this one be any different?

'We need to keep winning races,' says Jonny Brownlee (left, with Alistair). Photo: Getty Images

"I'm not much of a worrier but, if I think of things that could go wrong, injury is the big one," the elder Brownlee admitted to BBC Sport before he sustained that tendon tear.

"If I got an injury in a month's time" - which, indeed, he has - "I could still get pretty fit in the time I have. But I'd be standing on the start line [at the Olympics] feeling this is not where I want to be, and then maybe third place is my best possible finish.

"It's important not to plan too much. You can't plan for every situation, and then the situations you haven't planned for happen and you don't know how to deal with them. You have to be prepared for the worst on the day. Fitness and confidence has a lot to do with it. If you have that, you can deal with almost anything that's thrown at you."

The injury is by no means unmanageable. It could be far worse. Brownlee is expected to imminently ramp up his training once more, and the time lost may prove inconsequential.

Jonny Brownlee hopes so. He knows that, currently, a sizeable portion of the battle in each race is being won by the reputation the brothers have carved out with their phenomenal results of the past three years.

"It's important we keep on winning races," he told us. "If we're both continuously doing well, we can turn up to races and some people are beaten before we even start. They turn up, they see us, and they think, 'Aw no, they're here.' That's a massive advantage.

"I've been beaten by people like that before - [Spanish rival] Javier Gomez is an example. I remember racing against him a few years ago: I turned up to the start and I was beaten by him already. I thought I couldn't beat him. So we need to keep that going."

Now, there is only one person Jonny Brownlee believes he cannot beat. His brother. Fascinatingly, the two employ vastly different mindsets when it comes to who, in their ideal world, finishes first on that Olympic podium this year.

"I don't think I've ever been on a start line, looked across, and thought I could beat Alistair," admitted Jonny Brownlee. "I'm not racing for second - I'm racing to win - but at the same time I know when Alistair's on top form, he's going to beat me.

"If he wins and I come second, it's a victory for both of us. If I definitely wanted to beat him then maybe I'd change a few things I do - I could be more selfish and work against him - but at the same time we would lose an advantage both of us have. We can use each other massively."

Framing the men's Olympic race as one determined by whether Britain can install both Brownlees on the start line intact and confident would be wrong. The variables beyond that are many. Alistair Brownlee may have won nine out of 11 races in 2011, a staggering figure, but he still didn't win two. It is not that simple.

However, for Jenkins the question is different. She is older than the Brownlees - 27 to Alistair's 23 and Jonny's 21 - and her path to the world number one spot has been carved out with gritty consistency and top-five finishes, not a dazzling row of gold medals.

Helen Jenkins' determination and consistency earned her the world number one spot. Photo: Getty Images

"It's been a slower progression for me," she said as 2012 dawned. "Alistair went from 12th at the Olympics in 2008 to winning every race in 2009, and he's won more than 50% of the world series races he's ever entered. That's amazing. I just haven't had that sort of explosion onto the scene.

"I've been around a bit longer, a bit more under the radar. In 2011, I won only one race on the world series but I had a few seconds."

The challenge for Jenkins, used to operating on fewer race wins than Alistair Brownlee, is to make sure one of them happens to turn up at Hyde Park in August. Happily for her, in 2011 that was the case.

"Hyde Park was incredible," she said. "I've not experienced support like that in a race before. And it replicated the Olympics, putting all that pressure on yourself for one day."

Alistair won the men's race that weekend, with Jonny third, ensuring all three earned Olympic qualification. The sheer level of British support stunned them. We journalists can write until we are blue in the face that these triathlons medals are as good as won but, if things do go awry on the day, it might be the crowd that saves them.

"I remember saying in the press conference before the race that the home crowd makes no difference," recalled Alistair. "Then tens of thousands of people turned up. At the swim, as far as you could see down the Serpentine there were people four abreast walking up to watch the race. The cheers were amazing. I thought, 'Wow, maybe there is something in this home-crowd malarkey.' That sticks with me.

"It was a big ask to get two of us in the top three at that race, and when we actually did it, it was like, 'Wow'. But all the hype is external to us. We've seen what's possible, we know what we can do. Hopefully we can go out and execute."

"Even last year, at the World Championships, they were like, 'We want you back'. But I'd made other commitments and I love what I do," he recalls.

Staff, now 38, rode to gold with Sir Chris Hoy and Jason Kenny in the men's team sprint at the Beijing Olympics four years ago. Hoy and Kenny have fought on to London 2012 but Staff, troubled by injury and keen to see more of his family, called it a day.

The problem for British Cycling is that Staff's skill and pace as "man one" in the team sprint - the team's leader for the opening lap - were almost unparalleled. Replacing him has proved impossible in the years since his retirement.

Hence, Staff says, the offer to bring him back out of retirement and reunite the full, golden Beijing line-up. But by "other commitments" he means his new job, as a coach to the sprinters in the United States track cycling team.

Jamie Staff, in US coaching guise, chats to Ross Edgar, tasked with filling his GB shoes. Photo: Getty

He now lives in southern California's Orange County, far removed from his years spent at British Cycling's base in Manchester. The drive to abandon his coaching career and return to cycling for Britain, even at a home Olympics, did not exist.

"My wife's spent most of her adult life in California and she found it pretty hard being over in the UK, living somewhere notorious for being pounded by rain," says Staff. "I was away travelling and racing; she was at home with two young kids, in a village, with rain. She struggled and it got hard.

"I miss certain things - like road rides in the countryside, because LA is a concrete jungle - but I don't know whether my back would have coped with more riding, and, more than that, you have to want it.

"You've got to want it more than anything else, and that's what people don't realise. You've got to want to do it and I was ready to move on, to be a family man and be there for my wife. There's more to life than just sport."

That may be, but Staff has remained within his sport to coach a US outfit which, he says, needs much the same treatment as the British team of a decade ago. He has been given both the budget and the backing. Now he is set for the long haul, charged with turning American track cycling into something resembling Britain's successful programme.

Doing so means watching the British at work. While filming the GB team sprinters in their qualifying heat at the Olympic Velodrome on Friday, Staff felt an odd pang of disappointment at no longer playing his part in that success story.

"For the first time, watching GB get on the line for the team sprint qualifier, I actually missed racing," he says. "I was standing there, filming it, and I wished I was up there.

"Part of me wants to go out there, still be in front of the crowd and enjoy every moment of that. But a big part wants to move on."

British Cycling could not confirm that Staff had been approached last year. But, if Staff did turn down the opportunity to rejoin his team sprint colleagues, he is certainly not short of opinions on how Britain - who won bronze in the event on Friday - can best replace him.

Highlights: GB men's team sprint win bronze in Olympic Velodrome

"Even I was surprised. I was expecting someone would be able to step up when I retired," he says. "And I know Jason Kenny can do it. He could go out there and I've no doubt he could go as quick, possibly even quicker than me in man one. But then that leaves another spot empty.

"I would personally put Jason at one, Ross [Edgar, currently riding in Staff's old position] at two and Chris in three. The time they would gain from Jason in one is better than the couple of tenths they might lose with Ross in two."

Has he suggested this to his former employers?

"I met [performance director] Dave Brailsford and [coach] Shane Sutton in the hotel the other night and mentioned it. The coaches know what they're doing; they're not silly. They're trying different combinations.

"To me, though, it's obvious. I know Jason doesn't enjoy riding at one - he says he doesn't get to go fast enough - but at the end of the day you're out for medals, not to enjoy yourself."

In his career, Staff managed both. He can quickly pinpoint all sorts of tiny moments from that glorious day in Beijing: snapshots of panic on reaching the Olympic final, a calming chat with psychologist Steve Peters, strange tranquility in the seconds before the race, then jubilant phone calls to family having stepped down from the podium.

"Every year got better and better. We're looking at each other each time saying, 'Seriously, this cannot be happening'. Even we were surprised," he says.

"I was so fortunate, it was an amazing time to be a part of British Cycling. I email Chris Hoy still, now and then. We had our good times; we're still good friends.

"And it's a shame because, for the likes of Chris, London 2012 is his last race - probably - and he might not be able to double or triple up.

"But I'm not going to put it on my shoulders," Staff adds with a smile. "They may have failed in terms of getting someone new, but I haven't let them down."

The Qatar sun, radiating a pleasant but not stifling 24C on this February morning, brings such a bright white light from the 26-year-old's rainbow jersey - gained for winning last year's world road race title - that the man standing above him must wear shades to look down and hold a conversation.

That man, in his 60s, fits his own white shirt a little less easily than he once did. He is Eddy Merckx, perhaps the greatest road cyclist in history, with three of those world titles to his name alongside five Tour de France wins and countless other honours.

When Cavendish starts races, he sets out to break records, and many of those belong to Merckx. But this year, Cavendish might accomplish something Merckx never achieved: an Olympic victory.

Many other cyclists don't take the Olympics all that seriously. For them it's the big tours, the classics, the world championships. But Cavendish sees the Games as a separate entity.

Mark Cavendish encounters a new kind of lead-out train in Qatar. Photo: Getty Images

"At the Olympics, I'm carrying the weight of Great Britain," he tells us later.

"That's what's so special about it. The Tour de France, the Tour of Qatar, that's my professional life: I get paid to ride a bike. Simple as. The Olympics is something different, you're putting on a jersey that represents the flag of the country you're born under.

"I'm a patriotic guy. To ride the Olympics for my country, especially in London, with it being the first medal on offer, on a course that suits us... it's quite exciting. I'm looking forward to the end of July."

If all goes to plan, Cavendish will be led to the brink of Olympic gold by four British team-mates on 28 July, then unleashed in the dying seconds to apply the afterburner and inch past his rivals. Not everybody is convinced the London 2012 course will pan out that way, but that is the Cavendish trademark and the dream.

He demonstrated how it ought to look in Copenhagen last September, when he won his rainbow jersey in exactly that fashion. A matter of days later, he confirmed a deal to leave the now-defunct HTC-Highroad cycling outfit for Team Sky, overseen by British Cycling performance director Dave Brailsford. On 11 October, his move was announced to the world.

Cavendish wins 2011 world road race gold in Copenhagen

The switch had been widely anticipated. Cavendish in Team Sky colours, alongside fellow superstar compatriot Bradley Wiggins, seemed to make sense from every angle. Cavendish either used to race with, or grew up riding alongside, many of his new team-mates. His Austrian HTC-Highroad colleague Bernie Eisel, who stays close to Cavendish on and off the road, came with him.

But Cavendish and Team Sky appeared a particularly good fit because of a man named Rod Ellingworth.

Cycling fans know who Ellingworth is. The chances are, many of those who voted Cavendish the BBC Sports Personality of the Year after his sensational 2011 season do not. Cavendish might not be a world champion, Tour de France green jersey winner or Olympic favourite without Ellingworth.

"He just knows what it is to be a bike rider," says Cavendish of the man so often described as his mentor. "He loves it, he lives for it, it's more than a job for him - it's a life, it's a commitment. He's got as much passion for it as I have. That's why we get on so well."

While Cavendish was racing for HTC-Highroad his opportunities to talk with Ellingworth, Team Sky's race coach, were limited. In pro road cycling, you cannot pick up the phone and have long cycling chats with other teams' staff - even if Ellingworth doubled as the British team coach.

"We worked together preparing the GB team for the 2011 Worlds," continues Cavendish, "but it was a case of very definitely having to keep my professional team and GB as separates.

"We did that really well but it's nice to finally be back with a group of riders who I've grown up with, a lot of old team-mates, and management who've known and nurtured me since I was really young. Touring with Rod on a daily basis is the best thing for me."

Ellingworth, who will celebrate his 40th birthday on the penultimate night of the London Olympics, has a coaching pedigree which far exceeds that he earned as a road cyclist. Now Cavendish is back fully under his wing, in a team packed with British talent.

"For the Olympics it's absolutely crucial [for Cavendish to race with Team Sky]," says Ellingworth. "In every single race he'll be riding alongside guys who, potentially, he's going to ride the Olympics with.

"Mark's a good bike rider and he would make it somehow, in his own way. But with us, he knows why we're working with him. Nobody's trying to get anything from him or make something off the back of Mark. He's with us because he trusts us all.

"He knows why you're being honest: because you want him to be the best he can be. For sure, in this team, he can go a long, long way."

It's hard to go a long way in Qatar. A nation of one city, Doha, and few major roads, the week-long tour is over in a flash. Cavendish finishes with two stage victories and a crash, limping over the line of the final stage sans helmet having tangled himself up in the sprint.

"My helmet disintegrated and I was sliding on the back of my head for quite a while," he says, a few hours later. "I'll need some treatment on that for the next couple of days. Apart from that I didn't take too much skin off: a bit of my elbow, my hip, normal cycling wounds."

This is where the road to glory in 2012 begins: a desert nation, sand whipped up in the crosswinds, camels paraded at the start line, sheikhs reclining at the finish.

The Tour of Oman is next on the list. These destinations may not sound much like Box Hill but Cavendish, chasing world, Olympic and Tour success in the year to come, is exactly where he wants to be.

A group of seven teenage girls who, with their parents' help, funded their own bid for Olympic glory, fell a minuscule fraction short of the standard required to reach London 2012 - missing their target by the sum of 0.273 marks.

If that sounds small, it is. The margin between the greatest success they could have imagined, reaching their home Olympic Games, and the horror of failure after all that time and money, could scarcely have been smaller.

Everybody cried. The girls, some of them lying prostrate on the floor in tears, hid behind a gigantic black curtain away from the crowd and media.

The British team were distraught to learn they had failed to reach their target (Photo: PA)

If every word from his mouth appeared to hurt him, imagine how it felt to be one of the gymnasts.

The crowd, which booed in horror as Britain's score appeared on London's O2 Arena scoreboards, did its best to encourage them. But by that point, slicks of mascara had already stained their heavily made-up faces.

"We're all ready to fight tomorrow," Rachel Smith, the team captain and the one most prepared to face the cameras at her lowest ebb, told us defiantly.

"This isn't the end to us, this isn't the last you're going to see of this group. We're not messing around. Nobody's having a joke here. We're being serious. We want to go."

And that was the heartbreaking moment when it became apparent that the team did not believe their fight was over. They believed in tomorrow, but tomorrow did not exist.

"I don't think it's the end," said Smith's team-mate, Lynne Hutchison. "We can show a credible performance, show we're good enough and hopefully we might get something."

Here were the team, insisting they would come out for the Olympic test event's finale on Wednesday and show something more - do something, anything - to convince the powers-that-be to send them to the Games.

And yet the message from British Gymnastics and the British Olympic Association, who between them set the target in the first place, was incontrovertible. This was the end, they confirmed to us. Wednesday mattered not one jot. The rules laid down said Tuesday's qualifying score had to beat 45.223. It did not, and there could be no appeal, no reprieve, no mulligan.

Tim Jones, the performance director, fought to mask his sorrow as he delivered the fateful words.

"We went through a process with the British Olympic Association of agreeing a standard we felt would show credible performance," he said.

"It would have been a score that gave us a platform to launch rhythmic into the next four years, but there wasn't any leeway. They will not be nominated."

But still the gymnasts would not, could not accept this. It did not sink in. Jade Faulkner, the reserve for Tuesday's performance who had watched her Olympic dream evaporate from the sideline, insisted afterwards it was not over.

Can you blame them? Can you blame a group of teenage girls who have sacrificed years of their lives, and thousands of pounds of their families' cash, in pursuit of a dream that has been taken away for the sake of a fraction of one mark? If it were you, would you be any different?

But then, if you were the British Olympic Association, could you possibly act any differently?

The target score had been established for some months now. Having decided to set the bar at 82% of the top score at last autumn's World Championships, in Montpellier, British Gymnastics and the BOA gave the rhythmic squad many weeks to wrestle with that benchmark and develop a way to reach it.

The BOA even brought in legendary ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean to advise the squad on the best way to show off their artistry and impress the judges. Anything which squeezed an extra tenth of a mark out of the panel would be worth it. The team listened, too - their routines inside the O2 Arena were packed with finishing touches gleaned from a couple of hours in the exuberant Dean's company.

Torvill and Dean coach GB rhythmic gymnasts in December

That it all came to nothing is sad for the gymnasts and their families, whose sacrifice has been great and whose reward is now nothing but the memory of having been on a journey. It is hard to see how they can possibly continue as a group.

The money is not there (rhythmic gymnastics receives no UK Sport funding) and the four years to Rio 2016 - where qualification is even less likely, since Britain will no longer have access to host-nation places - must seem a lifetime to the teenagers whose eyes are still drying.

I asked their coach, Sarah Moon, if her team could be expected to find the cash to carry on for another Olympic cycle. "No. No, of course not," she said, swallowing tears. "We're not sure what happens next. We'll think about that."

The target score need not have existed. Nothing, really, is stopping the BOA sending the rhythmic gymnasts to the Games with its blessing. Britain has a guaranteed place in the group event, courtesy of hosting the Olympics.

But the BOA and British Gymnastics decided to impose this benchmark regardless, as a way of showing that British athletes would only be sent to their home Olympic Games if they proved they had the talent to go. For all the hurt, grief, bewilderment and disbelief it has caused this group of teenagers, that is a laudable stance.

They know, now, that to turn around and find a loophole with which to include the youngsters at the Olympics would open them to ridicule. It cannot be done, much as performance director Jones - who is already taking a battering from the gymnasts' families and friends on Facebook - may wish it could.

Instead, the gymnasts are victims of the BOA's promise that every British athlete stepping into an Olympic arena this summer will be delivering both a competitive performance and a lasting legacy for their sport.

Sadly for the rhythmic gymnasts, they are left with neither. This remains a sport with no money, few prospects and plenty to cry about. That Britain's Olympic ideals have been upheld will be of scant consolation now.

Winning medals at a World Championships would normally be the ambition for anyone.

But for Britain's gymnasts, the priority over the next 10 days in Tokyo is qualifying for London 2012.

For the first time in modern gymnastics, Britain has an excellent chance of sending a full complement of 10 gymnasts to an Olympics.

To do that, the two British teams here - men's and women's - must finish in the top eight after team qualifying at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium.

Given the British men came through qualifying at last year's Worlds in fourth, and the women fifth, that target is well within reach. But it means thoughts of medals can wait.

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Beth Tweddle wins the uneven bars world title in 2010 (UK only)

"We are very clear that our priority is to qualify both of our teams for London at this first opportunity," said performance director Tim Jones.

"From the way our preparations in recent weeks have gone and the quality of the gymnasts, we believe we have every chance of achieving this goal."

At a major gymnastics event, qualifying works by sending your team of six gymnasts in to perform on every piece of apparatus - the British women go on Saturday evening Japanese time (1200 BST), and the men on Monday morning (0315 BST).

Add up the four best scores your gymnasts produce on each piece, and that gives you the team's overall total. The top eight nations' teams go through to the team final - which will be Tuesday for women, Wednesday for men. The scores from qualifying are also used to determine who goes into the individual finals, which run from Thursday to Sunday.

So one qualifying session goes a long way. Places in this year's finals and next year's Olympics rest on those British performances on Saturday and Monday.

If it doesn't happen, all is not lost. Teams who come through qualification in ninth to 16th place must instead go to the Olympic test event, at London's O2 Arena in January next year, and the top four teams there will still make it to the Games.

But that would be far from ideal for the British team. They want to make sure of qualification for the Games now, leaving them the whole winter for gymnasts to recover from Worlds, plan their 2012 campaign and have the maximum time to prepare the very best routines. As outspoken pommel horse star Louis Smith constantly reminds people, you need to have something up your sleeve for the Olympic event to surprise your rivals and the judges.

If you have to haul yourselves to the Olympic test event and qualify via that route, it means an extra "peak" after the months-long process of building up your athlete for a major event, which takes up their time and energy, and that of their coaches.

Far easier to get the job done now and use those months planning for 2012 rather than biting your nails off in worry about just getting there. Unthinkably, if Britain's teams failed to make the top four there, as few as two Brits (a man and a woman) could end up competing at the Games. That scenario is possible, but very unlikely.

You can understand the urgency all this lends to qualifying. However, if Britain come through that successfully, then finals will start to matter again.

Dan Keatings - praying for injury-free return to action (Photo: PA)

Beth Tweddle is the current uneven bars world champion, having nailed her routine - one of the most complex in the world - in Rotterdam last year as Chinese duo He Kexin and Huang Qiushuang both fell.

Those two are both back this year and will be determined to lift a title which, had they stayed on the bars, they had every chance of winning last time. That's what the sport is about, balancing the higher score you get for trickier moves against the risk of messing it up.

One of Tweddle's assets lies in usually striking that balance. As she said after winning the title: "It was theirs to lose and mine to gain. That's what happened."

Tweddle may also be a threat on the floor, a title she won in 2009 before failing to reach the 2010 final (won by Australia's Lauren Mitchell, an overdue world gold for her).

Watch out for GB's Hannah Whelan in the all-around event (all four pieces of apparatus), a final which has been blown wide open by the absence of Russian superstar Aliya Mustafina, who suffered ligament damage at the European Championships earlier this year.

Mustafina reached every final last year and won all-around gold. Russia's leading lights are Youth Olympic champion Viktoria Komova and European champion Anna Dementyeva in her place.

Injury has also hampered the American team. Only two of the US women's squad who travelled here have previous Worlds experience, and both of those - Alicia Sacramone and Aly Raisman - have picked up knocks since arriving, in Sacramone's case to the extent that she can't compete. How the young US team copes, particularly 16-year-old newcomer Jordyn Wieber, will be interesting.

In the men's events, Smith's personality has earned him the poster-boy tag ahead of 2012 but he needs a strong performance here in Tokyo. At the very least, he needs to stay on the horse.

Smith fell from the apparatus at this year's European Championships, as he did at the World Championships in London two years ago. Again, he's trying to balance an incredibly difficult routine against the risk of falling.

Louis Smith falls from the pommel horse at the 2011 Euros (UK only)

"It's the hardest routine in the world and it's what hopefully will set me apart and help me stand out," he recently told the BBC.

If executed perfectly, that routine will win Smith an Olympic gold medal. However, if it only has (say) a 50% success rate, at what point does that become too much of a liability to take to the Games?

Daniel Keatings returns to the World Championships for the first time since winning all-around silver in 2009, following a year out with ligament damage sustained just after becoming the European champion in 2010.

Hearteningly for the British team, Keatings reckons he's in better form than ever. If that proves the case, he and Dan Purvis, a world bronze medallist on the floor from last year, will lend GB an exceptionally strong core.

China, as ever, are the major medal threat across the men's events. Only one of the seven men named in their squad has not previously won at least one world title and he, Guo Weiyang, is the current national all-around champion.

But keep an eye on hosts Japan, too. We're inside the venue where Japanese men won five of the eight Olympic titles available on home turf at the 1964 Games, and the team this year looks as strong.

Star name Kohei Uchimura is looking to make history as the first man to win the all-around title three times in a row. And the Tanaka family should be out in force to see not one but three of their children in action: Kazuhito and Yusuke Tanaka in the men's events, and sister Rie in the women's. Mum and dad were both gymnasts, too.

Some useful links:

- British squad for 2011 Worlds
- Schedule and BBC coverage details
- My tweets from Japan

"I've never trained this hard in my whole life," says Richard Kruse, Britain's best bet for a medal at London 2012, as he takes a break during a week of preparation for next week's World Championships in Sicily.

"By the time the World Championships come, I'll either be dead or a gold medallist."

British Fencing would prefer the latter. A medal of any colour at senior world level has been beyond Britain since the 1960s.

In May this year the governing body hired a new performance director, Alex Newton, to put things right.

"I'm showing the results in training. The scores are good," says Kruse. "We've beaten the Japanese three times recently and those guys are world-class. They came third at the last World Championships [where Britain finished nowhere near the medals] so, if we can do that, then the podium is in sight this year."

Richard Kruse is Britain's highest-ranked fencer. Photo: Getty Images

Kruse's foil fencing team-mate Laurence Halsted agrees.

"We can see the benefits already," says Halsted. "Now I'm fitter and stronger: my legs are more powerful, so I feel I can be a lot more agile and fight with a real tenacity that I didn't used to have.

"Having had two championships go by without medals - the Worlds and this year's Euros - it would be amazing to have this hard work pay off. I want to have something to celebrate, not another devastating disappointment."

And yet devastating disappointment is exactly what a different group of fencers felt, watching these changes unfold.

One of Newton's least popular decisions, albeit one taken at the head of a selection committee, was to omit epee fencer Jon Willis from the team for the World Championships. Willis and Kruse are the only British fencers in the last two decades to have won major senior events.

Newton says: "The issue is what real, top-class performance looks like. Is being number one in Britain good enough? Will it win you an Olympic medal?"

Put more bluntly, the new policy meant if you can't challenge for medals on the world stage or are not on an upward trajectory towards that point, don't expect to be selected.

Willis may have won a major event, but it was in 2007 and he has done little since. His backers argue epee is an unpredictable sport and he always has a chance of winning on the day, plus he hasn't had the backing he should. Others say his continued selection takes up space and money that fencers with a brighter future could better use.

However, following his omission, emails began to reach BBC Sport from young fencers, their friends and parents. All demanded anonymity.

One parent said: "My child feels completely demoralised, ignored and let down by British Fencing."

A top young British fencer wrote: "It is a little demoralising to see senior fencers working their bums off this Olympic year, only to be denied the opportunity to compete.

"It sends the message that if I work hard, get to the top of the rankings and get decent foreign results, there's still no guarantee I would be selected."

In response, Newton holds up British Cycling as the example to follow.

"The cycling team made some pretty difficult high-performance decisions about which athletes they did and didn't send to events, very early on, in 1997 and 1998.

"The only reason we are being funded now is because London is hosting the Games. What we have to do with this opportunity is say to [funding body] UK Sport, 'We can deliver medals for you.'

"The clock is counting down fast to 2012 and I can see what we need to do, but we've got to do it at breakneck speed.

"You have to try to take people along with you but that's a challenge in a sport with 10,000 members."

Newton's "no-compromise" stance on selection is a common one, shared by UK Sport and a host of other sports.

But the problem is communication with the wider sport. If the same policy leads younger fencers to feel demoralised and overlooked at a critical stage in their careers, that could be dangerous.

After all this, Willis is now preparing to fight at the World Championships. He was reselected to the team last month following a successful appeal.

"We didn't have to pick him," insists Newton. "There was no defeat, or mistake. The appeals panel sent it back to us and we reconsidered.

"I'm absolutely fine with Jon going to the Worlds. I know people think I'm not."

Next week's World Championships will be the first major test of Newton's fencing philosophy, having barely taken her post by the time of July's Euros.

If Britain's fencers bring back a medal from Sicily, it will go a long way to justifying this summer's upheaval. In several years, it may well fade to a distant memory.

The best senior fencers are clearly already reaping the rewards. For now, young fencers wait to be shown that the new programme creates success rather than limiting opportunity.

The 32-year-old has already lost both of her legs to a rare and aggressive condition which causes her body to reject its own injured limbs.

Now, after a training accident last month in which she dislocated her shoulder, she is worried she may lose her arm, too.

In her position, you would be forgiven for wanting to shut the door behind you and never come out again.

But Morris, who operates her bike with her hands, needs cycling. It is her life, consuming and sustaining her.

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Rachel Morris explains her fears after dislocating her shoulder in a training crash

"Handcycling is more than a sport to me," said the Paralympic time trial gold medallist as she prepared for the sport's World Championships in Roskilde, Denmark.

"It's a way of managing the pain. Without it, my life becomes unmanageable. And it's what I do - it's what I get up to do in the morning, it's what I go to bed at night thinking about. It is me."

Her mother, Hilary, added: "She's driven by it. People say how wonderful it is when they see her out training at five in the morning. 'Yes,' I say, 'it is wonderful - but it's for pain control.' And then they think, 'Ooh. Gosh.'

"But she has to do what she has to do. Part of her pain management is to push her body hard, distract herself and release endorphins into her brain which help control the pain.

"She's driven by the pain to a great extent so you can't hold her back, because you can't let her have any more pain. She suffers every day, all day, anyway."

Morris's troubles began in the most terrifyingly innocuous of circumstances as a teenager.

"All I did in the beginning was twist my ankle on a dry ski slope," she says, apologetically. "It's quite embarrassing, it wasn't even on a snow-covered mountain.

"From that I had an awful lot of problems which weren't picked up at the beginning - my condition is a strange thing, especially the way mine ended up going - and unfortunately it's ended up with me having multiple amputations."

The condition goes by several names, two of the most common being Reflex Sympathetic Distrophy (RSD) and Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.

Since it began destroying Morris's legs she has had to move from sport to sport, each time accommodating a new level of disability. Her childhood love of athletics became a passion for sailing but, once she lost her second leg, road cycling was identified as the way forward.

She lives life, and competes, in near-constant pain.

"There are two sorts of pain," she explained. "One is from phantom limbs, and one is a pain inside you that has the same intensity as catching your arm on the oven or an iron.

"The first one gives you strange feedback where your limbs were, as though your foot is facing the wrong way or twisted around, and I feel that a lot with my left foot. Obviously, I've got no legs but it's incredible what your brain will do: in the night I'll wake up with cramp in my foot and reach down. It's so real, you reach down thinking that your leg is there.

"The other pain is far more a burning pain which combines with what I call 'white pain'. That's when the pain is so powerful that there's nothing you can do about it, it'll make you drop anything and stop."

In the month leading up to the Worlds, things became even worse. Morris slid off a wet road on a training ride in Bath and dislocated her shoulder.

Morris out on the roads around Bath, just hours before dislocating her shoulder

"Causing this injury to my body could, potentially, trigger the same reaction that's happened in my legs, and cause the RSD to become active in my arm. Obviously I have no legs, so the worst-case scenario is that it could do the same thing to my arm," she replied.

"I've become almost paranoid about the colour of it or watching the temperature, which are two of the things that change early on. So I have become very, very worried."

A week later, Morris crossed the finish line fourth in her first race at the World Championships, her body shaking and writhing with the exertion for a good 10 minutes afterwards.

Though disappointed not to win a medal, back in the British team's pit area she seemed happy to have made it through the race.

"The best bit is my shoulder made it round the course. I came out and completed something I didn't think I could have done two weeks ago. I didn't do it as I would have wanted to, but I couldn't have done any more as I am at the moment."

A bronze medal in her second and final event, the road race, is something although - for last year's world champion - settling for one third-place finish was clearly immensely frustrating.

For more reasons than most, Morris is compelled to give everything she has to her sport. Next year, she would hate to settle for a bronze medal. But first she must get herself to the Paralympic start line safely, and that means almost 12 months of waking up and tentatively inspecting the suspect shoulder.

"I've got to think of next year," she says. "That is the ultimate goal for everyone and the pinnacle of my career, so I do have to be careful and protect myself for that.

"If that was taken away from me, I think that possibly is the point at which I would give up. Which is quite a terrifying thought, because the Games have so much power and so much emotion that does drive me on. Next year is massive in lots of ways."

See more from Rachel on this month's edition of British Olympic Dreams: BBC One, 1430 BST, Saturday 17 September and repeated at 1530 and 2230 on the BBC News Channel. Available on iPlayer for seven days from broadcast.

The news gets better. Not only do Alistair Brownlee and Helen Jenkins now hold the world titles, Alistair's younger brother, Jonny, came second in the men's event.

Meanwhile, Britain's U23 men raced to a one-two-three as the 2011 season reached its climax at the sport's grand final in China.

But for the unwitting intervention of a stray dog, the team's results could have been yet more impressive.

When I ask the man in charge of Britain's triathletes why his team have become such a dominant force, it transpires the stray dog is an analogy for the entire sport.

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Helen Jenkins wins the women's 2011 world title (UK only)

"The Olympics are 11 months away and we're in a strong position," says Malcolm Brown, British Triathlon's Olympic performance manager, who is in China with his victorious squad as they celebrate.

"But think of it like this. Lucy Hall, one of our junior women, was leading her race here when a dog ran into her path and knocked her off her bike.

"The life of an athlete is full of stray dogs and you have to know how to deal with them when - and if - you see them."

Two world champions and a conveyor belt of younger talent implies those metaphorical dogs are safely on the leash for now.

Brown boils Britain's success down to three things: triathletes using their brains on the course, the governing body using its brain off it, and ensuring that developing athletes get the right coaching at the right time.

He has form with the latter. In 2002, the former endurance running coach for UK Athletics was dabbling in a little part-time coaching at the track when a father turned up with his two teenage sons.

As Brown remembers it, the man pointed to the taller boy and said: "This one is a good cross-country racer but after 200m he's always at the back. Can you make him faster?"

Gesturing to the shorter boy, the man added: "Don't worry about him. He's a footballer."

Alistair Brownlee would have been around 14, and Jonny two years younger. Brown enlisted the help of his colleague and triathlon coach Jack Maitland and, over the next decade, the pair not only made Alistair a bit quicker, they turned Jonny's head from football (if not Football Manager) and transformed them into the two finest male triathletes on the planet.

Brown looked at running and conditioning for the brothers while Maitland, who won the Everest Marathon in 1999 and remains the only non-Nepalese man in the list of its fastest times, concentrated on swimming and cycling. With time, the pair added physios, strength and conditioning coaches and so forth to reach the current staff of seven or eight, including a full-time manager, who prepare the Brownlees for races.

This is important because the Brownlees, alongside Jenkins, have set a precedent which has become the template for Britain's top triathletes.

Rather than basing themselves in a single centralised venue, like British Cycling's Manchester velodrome, the very best British triathletes are allowed to form their own staff and training bases. The Brownlees use Yorkshire and Jenkins uses Bridgend.

Triathletes in the UK earn the right to do that by finishing in the world's top eight, establishing themselves as a "podium athlete". But the system is flexible and, if athletes outside the top eight are prepared to accept a funding cut, they too are allowed to opt out of the sport's centralised programme. The likes of Tim Don and Will Clarke have done this and are known as "affiliate athletes", who can train elsewhere but still use British Triathlon's facilities as they see fit.

This leaves the centralised portion of British Triathlon - based in four centres, primarily Loughborough - free to focus on nurturing younger talent. A team of coaches with visiting specialists helps to prepare the next generation, such as the trio of U23 men who swept the Beijing podium, to follow in the footsteps of the Brownlees and Jenkins.

Matt Sharp, for example, overcame several years of injury trouble with the Loughborough centre's help, particularly its medical and sports science capabilities. He is now the newly crowned U23 world champion after leading home team-mates David McNamee and Tom Bishop in Beijing.

Matt Sharp's coach, Mark Pearce, explains how Alistair Brownlee wins his races

Yet with serious money to be made for high-profile senior triathlon victories, if Sharp goes on to establish himself in the world's top eight he may look to follow the Brownlees and strike out away from Loughborough. It is not a perfect system and some triathletes believe they have been unfairly treated by it, but it is more fluid than many others and seems to work for the sport.

"If you take the Brownlees, they're born and bred in Yorkshire, went to Bradford Grammar, used to cycle to school along the towpath, do cross-country at school, and swim at Leeds swimming club in the morning," says Brown.

"That whole environment has supported them. They've got great running trails there, an excellent physio, good coaching and good education opportunities in the city - they're both Leeds and Leeds Met university graduates.

"If you say to them: 'Right, now we want you to move to some central venue,' the amount they have to give up - which makes them happy where they are - is huge. It's a huge risk. Why would you take that risk?

"The success of Helen and the two Brownlees enabled British Triathlon to feel confident that they could invest in and around talented athletes training with high-quality coaches in different places. You need individual arrangements for individual athletes within an overall framework of support, direction and stability."

That support gets the athlete to the race. Then, during the event, intelligence becomes the ultimate cog in the machine.

Brown sees triathlon as the most complicated of sports and wants athletes capable of thinking for themselves during the race, because making the correct decisions in the heat of the moment accounts for a large degree of the difference between, say, the Brownlees and the rest.

"Triathlon demands a substantial number of judgement calls: whether to follow a bike break or not, who are those guys up the road, will I go alone or will people come with me? In the run, what are my strengths and weaknesses and what do my rivals think they are? A lot of it is knowing yourself as an athlete," he says.

"If you're trying to create a world or Olympic champion, you have to create an environment where the individual athlete weighs up the circumstances, makes calls, and more often than not gets them right. That is what we have tried to do, and you can only do that by seeing them fail occasionally, or stepping back as a coach when you could provide the answer. It comes down to trusting the athlete."

Triathlon in Britain is healthy at all levels. Beyond the Olympics, Chrissie Wellington has become a legend of the sport with back-to-back-to-back world titles over the punishing Ironman distance.

Amateur membership in the UK has more than doubled in five years, the sport's own figures show, with race starts - numbers taking part in recognised races - up 10% in the last year alone to more than 130,000.

Brown, however, is not convinced this increased pool from which to draw can only mean more British success in future.

"The sport's burgeoning internationally," he counters. "The Germans have got a great set of juniors at the moment on the men's side, while the Aussies have some fantastic female athletes.

"We really have to raise our game. But we've got a platform to do that. If we can keep stray dogs off the path, we'll be OK."

In-fighting between top players and a lack of leadership sent the sport plunging from the high of Olympic silver at Athens 2004 to the low of being told by former star Gail Emms - one half of that silver medal - to expect nothing at their home Games in 2012.

Badminton England, which runs a national training centre in Milton Keynes and is responsible for most of the British stars preparing for 2012, subsequently asked for a chance to demonstrate to us that things are changing.

McPherson arrived from UK Sport last August as an interim performance director, to find out what was going wrong within British badminton and start to tackle the problems.

I met McPherson and the two other members of that critical triumvirate, new performance director Jens Grill and coach Kenneth Jonassen, at the national centre earlier this summer. They were keen for the organisation to appear as open as possible about its recent problems.

"The players were hugely frustrated," said McPherson. "There was no clear and consistent leadership, and a history of issues not being properly tackled and allowed to fester."

The big issue facing McPherson on her arrival was a falling-out between star player Nathan Robertson and team-mate Robert Blair. The disagreement, described as "kids in the playground" by one observer, culminated in Robertson refusing to play in the same team as Blair - just as McPherson was settling down at her desk for the first time.

Is British badminton ready to move on? BBC Sport's Jessica Creighton reports.

"Inevitably in an environment like this, working with the same people day in, day out, you're going to get tensions developing," she said.

"You have to deal with them and move on but that hadn't happened. Things needed to be calmed down and one of the most important things was telling the players we wanted their feedback.

"The real surprise for me was the number of players who said nobody had asked for their opinion before. These were people who'd been funded by the programme for five or six years. We asked why they hadn't been more proactive and knocked on doors, but they said they didn't think they'd be taken seriously and it might prejudice their selection on teams.

"People hadn't felt the programme was listening to them so they were giving their feedback to other forums instead - the badminton community and the media. They weren't doing that as a first port of call, they were doing it because they felt nobody was listening to them.

"It was very difficult to get back to the root cause of the issues, because there was a lot of emotion running quite high and some strongly-held opinions which weren't necessarily evidence-based," McPherson concluded, in beautifully diplomatic language from which one might reasonably infer some people were both outspoken and wrong.

Over the winter months, McPherson sat players and coaches down in small groups - usually no more than half a dozen - and told them "be as blunt as you like, but we have to hear it now". The players duly covered sheets of paper on the walls with suggestions and criticisms.

"They really responded to that," said McPherson. "I got some fantastic, honest feedback from the players that was also very balanced: a good combination between 'this is what it feels like for me' and 'these are my perceptions more generally'.

"For example, the players wondered whether we were giving their coaches enough chance to develop. They were thinking very holistically."

The players had hit on something: coaching at the national centre wasn't working, primarily because a lack of leadership left the players unsure who to speak to, afraid to raise issues, and often filling the vacuum themselves to the detriment of team morale. McPherson entirely understands how they felt.

"The players have to be very focused on what they're trying to achieve and if they feel the programme isn't delivering for them, they'll start to take control themselves," she said.

"And why wouldn't they? They may only get one shot at an Olympics and they have to make sure it's their best shot. Because of the lack of clear leadership, the players started to tackle things themselves.

"But they don't want to do that and they're not here to do that. When you tackle those areas properly, they'll quickly fall back and focus on what they're actually here to do."

Jens Grill, a veteran of two stints at Badminton England now elevated to the position of performance director, is the man who must act on McPherson's findings. He insists he has learned lessons from the year gone by and his priority will be to give the players the guidance they lacked.

"We can't have five leaders, we need one or two," he said. "Then we can move things forward. If you have five guys then nobody decides, everybody's a bit careful and nothing gets done. My first action has been for everyone to understand their job and that this is the guy who makes decisions."

Grill was in charge of Swedish badminton before returning to the British fold in June last year. He says he missed most of the fracas between Robertson and Blair, and he wouldn't comment specifically on their troubles.

But, asked if players de-selecting themselves could occur in future, he did say: "If you're picked to represent us, you play. If they say, 'I don't want to play in that, I'll play in the next championships,' then our investment is for nothing.

"This is a competitive environment, though. The guys are training together, helping each other, advising each other sometimes - but they are competitors. Some of them don't get on.

"It's like in a business, you've got colleagues you don't like that much but you're professional, you have a job to do and you get the most out of it, even if there are people you don't ask out for a drink on a Friday night. And we're the same here.

"These are characters thinking about themselves first, thinking they should be picked, and it's our job to manage it - but I don't want to remove it, because it's key to what we do."

The leadership problem has been resolved by replacing previous head coach Andy Wood, who quit in December believing he had been undermined by senior management, with two new posts: a head singles coach and head doubles coach.

The singles coaching post has gone to Kenneth Jonassen, a man in whom Britain's badminton players appear to have near-unshakable faith.

Jonassen is a master of the singles game, having been European men's champion as recently as 2008 and having spent time as the world number two. He is the final piece in the three-person puzzle.

"As a player Kenneth was very determined - not a lot of outbursts, but very physical," said Grill, who saw plenty of his fellow Dane in action when he was coaching while Jonassen was playing.

"His real strength was the mental side of his game. He was never the most elegant but he got the results and got the wins."

Kenneth Jonassen, new head singles coach at Badminton England, in his playing days. He is "hurt" by each defeat for his British charges. Photo: Getty Images

Jonassen, sitting bolt upright when we meet in a windowless room used to view tapes of matches, exudes the aura of the formidably driven. He talks formidable talk, too. We discussed his reasons for taking the post and recent British failure at the sport's flagship All-England Championships - where no British player made it past the second round - and he spoke as though a vision for British badminton played across his eyes.

"I enjoy it here, I like working with the players, they are very forthcoming and you can see they desperately want to achieve," he said.

"That's what I need. If I saw they were happy with the way things were, with the results they have now, then I'm not the right man for the job. When they lose, I lose as well, and it hurts me - it hurts me bad when we don't win and we had a chance to win. The All-England Championships? That was a bad day for me. That hurt.

"There's good talent there - some of them are a bit raw and need to be worked with to produce any form of champion. We need to be better at competing, they all know I want to see an improvement there.

"It's about your attitude when you go on-court. Getting that right every day in training is more important than at the tournament. People think they can just switch it on when they go on court in a tournament, and they can't. I want hungry players who will do whatever it takes to win."

Jonassen seems to hold a good number of the British squad under his spell. When asked about him, Chris Adcock - one half of the top British men's doubles pair, alongside Andy Ellis - leans in and says simply: "He's class."

Adcock and Ellis agree that Jonassen sees things others don't in their game, despite the Dane being nominally the head singles coach and not involved with doubles. The duo are visibly animated talking about the effect he has on them.

Rajiv Ouseph, Britain's best singles player and possibly the best hope at London 2012, knows more than most what Jonassen can do. When Jonassen arrived last year he made it his priority to work with Ouseph, 24, who duly gained 10 ranking places. He's now looking to break into the world top 10.

"I won't lie, Raj was a player that lured me here," said Jonassen. "He's massively skilful and I thought it could be interesting to work with a player like that.

"I've been able to push him a bit and work with very small details. If he gets them all right he'll have a huge impact. It's a huge step up to number one and two in the world but we're not that far behind the next bunch, and that will be interesting over the next six to 12 months."

Ouseph said: "I was at an age where I needed to press on and Kenneth coming in was crucial - it showed in the first tournament after he came, which I won.

"He can use so much of his own experience to help us. He's been there and done it. His badminton brain is the best thing about him - he's sitting behind our court and he'll see things very quickly and relay the messages to us.

"He's brought in a bit more competition between us all. Sometimes he gets involved as well and you don't really like losing to your coach, but Kenneth never wants to lose at anything: even when he's playing against us he never, ever wants to lose. He's brought a high intensity to training that can only be beneficial to us."

McPherson's identification of the failings, Grill's plan to set things right and Jonassen's marshalling of the troops at ground level will be the foundations on which British badminton's future is based.

Whether it's enough to make a real mark at Britain's home Olympics is another matter, and results have yet to experience any seismic shift since the changes took place.

But McPherson - who has now handed over to Grill and moved on - wants the players to understand that standards have to rise.

"UK Sport offers sports funding for a number of podium [i.e. top-tier] and development [second-tier] athletes - but you don't have to fill those places," she explained.

"Badminton did in the past. It wasn't a case of 'we've got 11 players good enough for podium so we'll fund them'. It was a case of saying 'we've been given 11 places so we'll find people for them all'.

"That's not the attitude of a lot of the other sports, who say you won't be funded at podium level until you've really earned it. That's something we've started to change.

"Some arguments from players who weren't offered a place on the programme have been entirely the wrong arguments, which shows they haven't understood that. 'I won the national championships,' is one of those arguments. Fine, but this isn't about funding people to win the national championships - where's the evidence that you're going to compete at Olympic level in future?

"For London next year we're looking at a minimum of one top-eight and a maximum of one medal. That's realistic. Then a lot of work over the next couple of years will be building sound foundations for the future.

"The goals for Rio 2016 haven't been set but that will happen after London and be informed by that. They will be based on a hard and honest assessment of our sport."