How Is Team GB Selected? Quotas, Nominations and Appeals
How Team GB is selected in the UK, from quota places won abroad to governing-body nominations, British Olympic Association ratification and appeals.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Team GB & the Games26 min read
- British Olympic Association founded
- 1905
- Wait after representing another country
- 3 years
- Athletics entries per nation per event
- 3
- Body that enters the team
- British Olympic Association
In the early summer of 2012 the British Olympic Association sent a nomination back. GB Taekwondo had put forward Lutalo Muhammad for the single British place at 80 kilograms ahead of Aaron Cook, who was ranked first in the world at the weight, and the BOA's panel in London would not ratify the name until the governing body had met again and shown its reasoning. Muhammad was confirmed at the second attempt and won a bronze medal. Cook had fought for Great Britain in Beijing and never did so at an Olympics again.
That argument exposed every moving part of the system. Team GB is selected in three steps, taken by three different bodies. A place at the Games is first won under the international federation's qualification rules, in most sports as a quota spot for the country and not for the person. The sport's national governing body then nominates named athletes under a selection policy it has published in advance. Last, the British Olympic Association, the National Olympic Committee for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, ratifies those nominations and submits the entries. Only the BOA can enter anyone in an Olympic Games. Winning the British trials, holding a world ranking or being funded by UK Sport does not put an athlete on the team unless all three steps have gone their way.
Who picks Team GB: three decisions made by three bodies
The question "who picks Team GB" has no single answer because nobody picks all of it. The International Olympic Committee fixes the total number of athletes at a Games and divides that number between sports. Each international federation, World Athletics or World Rowing or the Union Cycliste Internationale, then writes a qualification system that says how its share of places is to be won. Those documents are approved by the IOC years ahead and they are the reason a British team in one sport can be thirty strong and in another a single athlete.
What comes out of that first stage is, for Britain, a set of entitlements: a boat in the women's quadruple sculls, two starters in the men's triathlon, a place at 73 kilograms in judo. The second decision is who fills them. That belongs to the national governing body, the organisation recognised as running the sport in this country, working to a selection policy that the BOA has seen and agreed before the qualifying period opens. British Rowing picks crews. UK Athletics picks the athletics team. British Cycling picks riders across track, road, mountain bike and BMX.
The third decision is ratification. A governing body does not select anyone to Team GB in the strict sense. It nominates, and the BOA accepts or queries the nomination. In nearly every case acceptance is a formality, completed within days and followed by an announcement. The Cook case is remembered because it was the exception.
- Qualification systemThe international federation, with International Olympic Committee approval, sets how places are won and how many one country may hold.
- Place securedA British athlete, crew or team earns the place through rankings, standards, world championships or qualifying events.
- Selection policy appliedThe national governing body's panel chooses named athletes under criteria it published before the qualifying window opened.
- NominationThe governing body sends those names to the British Olympic Association with the evidence that the policy was followed.
- RatificationThe British Olympic Association confirms the athletes as members of Team GB, or returns the nomination with questions.
- EntryThe British Olympic Association submits the names to the organising committee before the sport entries deadline.
The order in which authority passes from the international federation to the national governing body and then to the British Olympic Association. Timings differ by sport.
One consequence is easy to miss. UK Sport, which invests National Lottery and Exchequer money in almost every Olympic programme, appears nowhere in that sequence. It funds the preparation and has no vote on the names. How that money is divided is a separate story, set out in our guide to how UK Sport shares Lottery funding.
Quota places and named places: who owns the spot
Most Olympic places are won by a person and owned by a country. A British sailor who finishes high enough at a world championship secures one boat for Great Britain in that class. The regatta result does not carry the sailor's name into the Games. It gives the Royal Yachting Association a place to fill, and the RYA's policy leaves it free to give that place to a rival crew judged the better medal prospect by the time the nomination is due.
Rowing works the same way with boats. So do canoeing, shooting, track cycling and the equestrian team events. The federations prefer it because it keeps the entry list full if an athlete is injured, and governing bodies prefer it because it lets them keep choosing until late.
A smaller group of sports ties the place to the individual. Tennis fills its singles draws from the world rankings on a fixed date and the place belongs to the player. Golf does the same through its Olympic ranking. Judo allocates most places by name from the world ranking list, and in boxing the place has been won in the ring by the boxer at a qualifying tournament, a route described in our page on how the GB Boxing squad qualifies. Even here the country keeps a veto of sorts: no athlete can be entered except by their National Olympic Committee, so a named place still needs the BOA's signature.
| Sport | How the place is won | Whose place it is | Cap per nation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Athletics | Entry standard or world ranking inside the qualifying window | The athlete qualifies, the nation chooses if more qualify than can go | Three per individual event |
| Swimming | Olympic qualifying time | As athletics | Two per individual event |
| Rowing | Boat's finish at the world championships or a qualification regatta | The nation's boat, not the crew who rowed it | One boat per event |
| Sailing | Nation places from world and continental regattas | The nation | One boat per class |
| Tennis | World ranking on a fixed date | The player by name | Four in each singles draw |
| Golf | Olympic Golf Ranking | The player by name | Two, or up to four if all are in the world's top fifteen |
| Judo | World ranking list | The athlete by name | One per weight category |
Athletics and swimming sit between the two models. An athlete earns eligibility personally, by running a time or holding a ranking, but only three Britons may start an Olympic 1500 metres and only two may swim a 200 metres freestyle. When five Britons have the standard, as happens in the stronger events, qualification has decided nothing and selection decides everything.
The athlete who earns a place and is then not given it has no legal claim to it, provided the policy said in advance that qualifying the place and filling it were separate questions. Every modern British policy says so, usually in its opening paragraphs, and that clause exists because athletes used to assume otherwise.
What a Team GB selection policy contains
A selection policy is a contract with a readership of a few dozen people. It runs to anything from six to twenty-odd pages, it is published on the governing body's website a year or more before the Games, and its job is to tell an athlete what they must do and tell an arbitrator afterwards what the selectors were allowed to take into account.
The common skeleton is this. A statement of aim, which in funded sports is nearly always some form of "to win medals" and not "to send the best-ranked athletes". A qualifying window with opening and closing dates. A list of nominated events. The names or job titles of the selection panel and who has a vote. Automatic criteria, which remove judgement. Discretionary criteria, which put it back. Rules on fitness, injury and proving form. A reserve policy. An appeals clause with a deadline measured in hours.
The interesting differences are in the balance between the automatic part and the discretionary part, and three British sports show the range.
Athletics: trials first, panel second
UK Athletics has long tied automatic selection to its trials. Finish at the top of an event at the national championships, usually in the first two, while holding the required qualifying mark, and the policy says the panel will nominate. The exact number of automatic places has varied from one cycle's policy to the next. The remaining place, and any event where too few athletes met both conditions, goes to a panel that may weigh current form, head-to-head record, championship pedigree and what the policy calls future medal potential. The format of the meeting itself is covered in our guide to the UK Athletics Championships and trials.
The harder edge is that UK Athletics has not always accepted every place it was offered. World Athletics aims to fill about half of each field by entry standard and the remainder from its world rankings. In recent cycles British policy has set its own performance thresholds for athletes relying on a ranking invitation and declined places for those who had not met them. Athletes who were good enough for the federation were left at home by their own governing body. That is a choice, defended as a matter of priorities and attacked as a waste of earned places, and it is written into the policy before anyone runs.
Swimming: one meet and a hard clock
Swimming's model is the simplest to describe. One trials meet in the spring, one set of consideration times, and those times are deliberately faster than the international qualifying time. A swimmer who finishes at the head of the final inside the consideration time is first in line for nomination, with the exact wording set afresh in each cycle's policy. Beyond that the head coach and performance director hold discretion, used mainly to complete relays. The detail sits in our page on how the British swimming trials work. A British champion can therefore swim under the international standard, win the national title and still not go.
Cycling: no trial at all
British Cycling holds no selection race for the track. Riders live inside a programme based at the velodrome in Manchester, are measured constantly, and a panel names the team from that evidence with medal potential as the governing test. The policy lists what the panel may consider and gives no automatic route for anyone. Our guide to the Team GB track cycling programme explains the pathway that leads to that panel's table.
Trials sports and panel sports
Britain tried the pure version once, and the story is still told as a warning by both sides of the argument.
For the 1988 Games in Seoul the athletics selectors adopted a trials system on something close to the American pattern, with the leading finishers at the trials in Birmingham guaranteed their places and one spot per event held back for discretion. Sebastian Coe, Olympic 1500 metres champion in 1980 and 1984, arrived unwell and failed to reach the final. The selectors gave the discretionary place to someone else. The decision was argued over in the newspapers, the president of the International Olympic Committee was reported to have raised the idea of a special invitation, and Coe did not run in Seoul. The background to his career is in our account of the Coe and Ovett years.
Those who favour trials read 1988 as proof that the system works: a rule was set, a great athlete failed it, and the rule held. Those who favour panels read the same events as the reason no British sport has since committed itself to first-past-the-post with no exceptions. Both are fair readings.
The case for a trial is transparency. An athlete knows the day and the standard. Nobody needs to trust a coach's opinion, and an appeal has almost nothing to bite on because the stopwatch made the decision. It also rewards the ability to perform on a given date under pressure, which is the skill the Games themselves demand.
The case for a panel is that a single day is a small sample. Illness, a fall, a tactical race or a headwind can remove the athlete most likely to win a medal eight weeks later. Panels can also do something a trial cannot, which is pick for a role. In 2012 British Triathlon used discretionary places in both the men's and women's teams to select athletes whose job was to work for a medal contender in the swim and on the bike, Stuart Hayes for the Brownlee brothers among them, rather than picking on individual results alone. The choice drew criticism and it stood, because the policy allowed the panel to weigh team tactics. Whether that is selection on merit depends on what merit is taken to mean.
Crew and team sports have no real choice. A rowing eight is built by trial and error across a winter, with pairs trials, seat racing and ergometer tests feeding a coach's judgement about which combination moves a boat fastest. A hockey squad needs a second goalkeeper and a penalty-corner specialist. No single race could produce those answers.
The settled British position is a hybrid weighted towards the panel. Trials decide the clear cases and protect the governing body from accusations of favouritism. Discretion decides the rest. The judgement worth stating is that the hybrid serves medal tables better than it serves athletes on the margin, who carry the cost of every clause that begins "the panel may".
The British Olympic Association's part in the selection process
The British Olympic Association was founded in 1905 at a meeting in the House of Commons, and it has been the body through which every British Olympic team has been entered since. Its members are the national governing bodies of the Olympic sports. It is a private organisation, and the point is not a technicality.
The Olympic Charter requires a National Olympic Committee to preserve its autonomy and resist political pressure. The BOA meets that requirement in the most direct way available: it takes no government grant and no National Lottery money. Its income comes from commercial partners, licensing of the Team GB brand, fundraising and its share of the International Olympic Committee's own revenues. When ministers urged a boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980 the BOA voted to send a team regardless, and it could do so because it did not depend on the Treasury.
In selection its part has three elements.
First, it agrees each sport's policy before the policy is published. A governing body cannot spring criteria on the BOA at the end of a cycle. Second, it receives nominations and checks them against that policy, which is ratification in the ordinary sense. Third, it holds the entry itself. Under the Charter only a National Olympic Committee may submit names to the organising committee, so a governing body that disagreed with the BOA would have nowhere else to send them.
Standards above the international minimum
The BOA can also ask for more than the federation does. It has at various Games agreed sport-by-sport standards intended to ensure that those who travel can deliver what it has called a credible performance, which in practice means declining a qualification place that a British athlete could only fill by finishing well down the field. Winter sports have felt this most, since the international quota systems in alpine and Nordic events hand places to nations that would not otherwise be competitive.
The most far-reaching extra condition was a bye-law. From 1992 the BOA declared any athlete found guilty of a serious doping offence ineligible for Team GB for life, whatever the length of the ban served. It stood for twenty years. In 2012 the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that it amounted to an additional sanction not permitted by the World Anti-Doping Code, and the BOA had to stop applying it a few months before a home Games. Athletes it had excluded became eligible at once.
That ruling marks the real limit of the BOA's discretion. It may be stricter than a federation about performance. It may not invent penalties that the international rules have reserved to someone else.
Who is eligible to be picked for Team GB
Rule 41 of the Olympic Charter says a competitor must be a national of the country of the National Olympic Committee that enters them. For Team GB that means a British citizen, and the practical test is the passport.
Nationality by descent counts the same as nationality by birth, which is why British teams have always included athletes raised abroad. The Charter then adds two refinements. An athlete who holds two nationalities may choose either country. An athlete who has already represented one country at an Olympic Games, a world championship or a continental championship, and then changes nationality or acquires a second, must wait three years from their last appearance for the old country before competing for the new one. The two Olympic committees and the international federation can agree to shorten or waive that period, with the approval of the International Olympic Committee's executive board. Federations may impose stricter transfer rules of their own, and several do.
The geography is wider than the name suggests. The BOA is the Olympic committee for the United Kingdom, for the three Crown Dependencies and for those British Overseas Territories that have no committee of their own.
| Territory | Status | Own Olympic committee | Olympic team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isle of Man | Crown Dependency | No | Team GB |
| Jersey | Crown Dependency | No | Team GB |
| Guernsey, including Alderney and Sark | Crown Dependency | No | Team GB |
| Gibraltar | Overseas Territory | No | Team GB |
| Anguilla | Overseas Territory | No | Team GB |
| Turks and Caicos Islands | Overseas Territory | No | Team GB |
| Bermuda | Overseas Territory | Yes | Bermuda |
| Cayman Islands | Overseas Territory | Yes | Cayman Islands |
| British Virgin Islands | Overseas Territory | Yes | British Virgin Islands |
The three territories with their own committees were recognised before 1996, when the Charter was amended to define a country as an independent state. No territory has been able to obtain recognition since. The result is an anomaly that produces real careers. Shara Proctor, a long jumper from Anguilla, could not compete at an Olympics for her island and switched to Great Britain, for whom she won a world championship silver medal in 2015. Delano Williams, a sprinter from the Turks and Caicos Islands, ran for British relay teams for the same reason.
The Crown Dependencies supply a steadier stream. Mark Cavendish is a Manxman. Carl Hester, a member of the dressage team that won gold in London in 2012, grew up on Sark. Both are British citizens and neither had another Olympic team to go to. At a Commonwealth Games the position is reversed and the islands enter in their own right, which is one strand of the explanation for why Team GB does not exist at the Commonwealth Games.
Northern Ireland and the choice of team
Hannah Scott, from Coleraine, won a rowing gold medal in the women's quadruple sculls at Paris 2024 wearing British kit. Daniel Wiffen, raised in Magheralin in County Down, won a swimming gold at the same Games wearing Irish kit. Jack McMillan of Belfast collected a relay gold with the British swimming team three years after swimming for Ireland in Tokyo. All of it was within the rules, and none of it was unusual.
Team GB's formal title is the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic Team. A person born in Northern Ireland is a British citizen in the normal way and is eligible for it. Under the Belfast Agreement of 1998 the same person has the right to identify as Irish, British or both and to hold either citizenship, and the Olympic Federation of Ireland sends a team drawn from the whole island. So the Charter's dual-nationality rule applies to most athletes from Northern Ireland from birth. They may choose.
In practice the sport often chooses for them. Boxing, hockey, rugby, rowing, swimming and cycling are governed on an all-island basis, with an Ulster branch feeding an Irish national body. A young boxer in Belfast comes up through Irish championships and an Irish high-performance unit, and reaching the British programme in Sheffield would mean leaving the system that developed them. Athletics is arranged the other way round: Athletics Northern Ireland is part of the UK Athletics structure, yet Northern Irish runners have also competed for Ireland throughout, Ciara Mageean among them.
Moving between the two is possible and costs time. An athlete who has represented Ireland at a major championship is caught by the three-year rule before appearing for Great Britain, unless the bodies involved agree a shorter wait, and some federations add conditions. Hockey has seen it in one direction repeatedly, with players capped by Ireland later appearing for England and Great Britain once the required wait had passed.
The short name is a sore point. "Team GB" was adopted by the BOA in 1999 as a brand, and Great Britain, strictly, is the island that Northern Ireland is not on. Politicians in Northern Ireland have asked more than once for "Team UK". The BOA's answer has been that the International Olympic Committee's country code is GBR, the brand is established, and the full title includes Northern Ireland. It is an explanation that satisfies marketing departments more than it satisfies people in Coleraine.
Appeals and how a non-selected athlete is heard
Selection day produces phone calls in a fixed order, and the athletes who are not going are told first. From that call a clock starts. Most policies give a non-selected athlete somewhere between one and a few days to lodge a written appeal, sometimes with a deposit that is returned if the appeal succeeds.
The grounds are narrow by design. An appeal is not a second opinion on who is the better athlete. The policies of British governing bodies converge on a short list:
- the selectors did not follow the published policy, or misapplied it
- the decision was affected by bias or a conflict of interest
- the athlete was denied a fair chance to meet the criteria through an error by the governing body
- the decision was one that no reasonable panel could have reached on the evidence
Disagreement with the policy itself is excluded. The time to object to a criterion was when it was published.
- Decision communicatedThe athlete is told they have not been nominated and may ask for the panel's written reasons.
- Notice of appealA written appeal is lodged within the policy's deadline, stating which permitted ground is relied on.
- Hearing in the sportAn appeal panel with no part in the original decision reviews the papers, often by video call within days.
- Independent arbitrationWhere the policy provides for it, a sole arbitrator or panel appointed through Sport Resolutions hears the case.
- OutcomeThe appeal is dismissed, or the decision is set aside and returned to the selectors to be taken again properly.
- Fresh decisionThe selection panel reconsiders and may reach the same answer by a correct route, after which the British Olympic Association ratifies.
The usual sequence under British governing-body policies. Deadlines and the number of stages vary from sport to sport.
Sport Resolutions is the independent body that makes the last stages work. Set up at the end of the 1990s as the Sports Dispute Resolution Panel, it is a not-for-profit service that maintains a list of arbitrators, mostly barristers and solicitors with sports experience, and convenes hearings at short notice. Many governing bodies now send selection appeals straight to it and skip an internal stage, because an appeal heard by colleagues of the selectors satisfies nobody.
The remedy is the part athletes find hardest. An arbitrator who upholds an appeal will normally remit the decision, sending it back to the selectors with a direction to apply the policy correctly. The arbitrator does not pick the team, on the reasoning that a lawyer is no judge of who will ride a faster team pursuit. Only where the policy leaves a single possible outcome does a panel go further.
That is what happened to the British rhythmic gymnastics group before London 2012. Their policy required a benchmark score at a test event. They missed it in qualification and reached it later in the same competition. British Gymnastics said the target had not been met. An arbitrator ruled that the policy, read fairly, had not confined the test to one day, and the group went to the Games. The governing body had drafted the criterion and bore the cost of its ambiguity.
Reserves, travelling alternates and late replacements
Three kinds of athlete surround a team without being fully in it, and their status is defined by accreditation.
A selected athlete holds the standard athlete accreditation, with a bed in the Olympic Village and access to competition venues. An alternate athlete, often called a P-accredited athlete after the category letter, is a reserve the federation's rules allow a team to bring. Alternates train with the team and can reach the training venues, but they are housed outside the Village and are not competitors unless and until they are swapped in. Then there are non-travelling reserves, named in the governing body's announcement and kept in training at home against an injury before the entry deadline.
Before the sport entries deadline, which falls a few weeks ahead of the opening ceremony, a governing body can change a nomination under its own policy and ask the BOA to ratify the new name. After it the list is closed, and any change has to go through the Late Athlete Replacement procedure that each federation agrees with the International Olympic Committee. The usual condition is an urgent medical one, certified by a doctor and accepted by the federation, and the replacement must be eligible and already entered as an alternate or on the long list. There is a final cut-off too, normally the technical meeting or first session of the event concerned.
Team sports and crew sports use the mechanism most. Rowing teams travel with spares who can be seated in a boat for medical reasons. Equestrian teams, reduced to three riders from Tokyo 2020 onwards, name a travelling alternate who may be substituted in, which is how Becky Moody came to ride in the British dressage team that won bronze at Paris 2024 after Charlotte Dujardin withdrew days before the Games. Athletics handles relays through a pool, with more athletes entered than will run so that the coaches can change the order between heat and final.
The awkward case is the reserve who is needed but not chosen. If the first reserve is out of form when the call comes, a policy that ranks reserves in a fixed order obliges the selectors to take them. A policy that leaves the choice open obliges them to explain themselves to the athlete passed over. Most governing bodies have moved to the second, accepting the argument as the price of flexibility.
From nomination to the team: announcement, kitting out and the flag
There is no day on which Team GB is announced. The team is revealed sport by sport over the best part of a year, each announcement following the BOA's ratification of that sport's nominations.
Sailors usually come first. Their quota places are settled early and the Royal Yachting Association likes to give crews a long run at the Olympic venue, so in recent cycles the first names announced have been sailors, confirmed many months before the Games. Canoeists, shooters and swimmers follow through the spring. Athletics comes almost last, days before the entry deadline, because its qualifying window stays open longest. The full team exists as a number only at the very end. For a home Games that number passed 540 athletes in London in 2012, since a host nation receives places in nearly every team sport.
Selection also brings paperwork. Every athlete signs the BOA's Team Members' Agreement, which sets the conduct expected, binds the athlete to the anti-doping rules, and commits them to wearing team kit at official moments. It also gives effect to Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, the provision that restricts how an athlete's personal sponsors may use their name and image during the Games period. An athlete who will not sign does not go.
Then comes kitting out. Each athlete spends part of a day at a venue set up for the purpose, collecting village wear, podium wear and the outfit for the ceremonies, with tailors on hand. It is the first occasion on which a shooter and a gymnast meet as members of one team, and athletes tend to describe it as the moment selection feels real.
The flagbearer is chosen last. The choice belongs to the BOA, which has used different methods at different Games, drawing on nominations from the sports and the views of team leadership. Since Tokyo 2020 the International Olympic Committee has invited every nation to name one woman and one man.
| Games | Opening ceremony flagbearer | Sport |
|---|---|---|
| Barcelona 1992 | Steve Redgrave | Rowing |
| Atlanta 1996 | Steve Redgrave | Rowing |
| Sydney 2000 | Matthew Pinsent | Rowing |
| Athens 2004 | Kate Howey | Judo |
| Beijing 2008 | Mark Foster | Swimming |
| London 2012 | Chris Hoy | Cycling |
| Rio 2016 | Andy Murray | Tennis |
| Tokyo 2020 | Hannah Mills and Mohamed Sbihi | Sailing and rowing |
| Paris 2024 | Helen Glover and Tom Daley | Rowing and diving |
Rowing's five places on that list, across nine Games, say something about which British sports have produced the longest careers. More reading across the Olympic sports is collected on our England guides hub.
How British Olympic athletes came to be chosen this way
For most of the twentieth century a British Olympian was invited. The governing body's committee met, usually after its national championships, and wrote to those it wanted. The Amateur Athletic Association's championships served as an informal trial for decades, but a committee was free to ignore the result and often did, favouring an athlete it knew over one it did not. No criteria were published because none were thought necessary. An athlete left out had no reasons, no hearing and no remedy. Nor, being an amateur, did that athlete have much to lose beyond the trip.
That last fact is what changed. From 1997 National Lottery money paid for full-time training programmes and for living-cost grants to the athletes on them. Selection for a Games now affected an athlete's income, their place on a funded squad and their commercial value. A decision with financial consequences, taken by a body exercising control over someone's livelihood, is one the law will look at. Governing bodies that had selected by conversation found themselves needing documents.
Three developments followed within a few years. Policies began to be written down and agreed with the BOA in advance. The Sports Dispute Resolution Panel was created to give sport a faster and cheaper forum than the High Court. And public funding agreements came to expect that a governing body in receipt of money would have a fair, published process and an appeal route.
What the appeal cases changed
The cases of the following decades did the detailed drafting. Each successful appeal exposed a clause that could be read two ways, and each was closed in the next cycle's policy.
London 2012 was the watershed, because a home Games multiplied the number of places and the number of athletes with a case worth arguing. The rhythmic gymnasts won on an ambiguity. The taekwondo dispute showed that the BOA's ratification was a real check and also where it stopped: the BOA could demand that a governing body justify itself, but once a properly constituted panel had applied its policy and reached the same view, the BOA ratified. The triathlon selections established that picking for a team role is defensible if the policy says so plainly.
The lasting effect has been longer, tighter policies. A modern one names the panel, lists every factor that may be considered, states that the list is not ranked, and reserves "sole discretion" in so many places that an appeal on anything except process is close to hopeless. Athletes are better informed than their predecessors and harder to wrong by accident. They are also easier to leave out, lawfully, by a panel that has followed its own rules.
One thing has not changed since 1905. The entry form is the BOA's, and a British athlete reaches the start line only when the BOA has put their name on it. For the wider picture of track and field selection and competition, see our athletics coverage.