Plastic Brits for the Olympics?

Once again this subject comes up of people using and abusing nationality issues to compete in International competition. I read this article in the Mail last weekend.
There is something indefinite about nationality, we are told by those that seek to defend the opportunistic laissez-faire around qualification for the Great Britain Olympic team.
They pretend the Plastic Brit debate is motivated by side issues, like foreign athletes claiming lottery grant money. It isn't. And when the Games start and the public see the extent of the manipulation that has taken place in this quest to finagle a way up the medal table, those who truly care for the principles of international sport will be repulsed.
This is about a wealthy country stealing athletes, or being willingly used by ambitious ones, in a mutually self-serving pact.

Thanks but no Yanks!!! Team GB hurdler Tiffany Porter was born in Michigan (photo above)
Nationality is not a matter of semantics or a bureaucratic brainteaser to be overcome with money and lawyers. It is the founding principle of international sport: without it, the Olympics is a glorified club meeting.
You probably know nothing of Great Britain's wrestling team right now, and that is just as well. In 2002, Nicolai Kornyeyev, a Ukrainian, was appointed coach and five years later, following an injection of £2.5million from UK Sport, he hit on a brilliant ruse.
He introduced two young European champions from his own country, Yana Stadnik and Olga Butkevych, to assist with training and act as sparring partners for the British women.
Soon after, Krasimir Krastanov, a Bulgarian, followed to help train the men. You can predict what happened next. The training partners became the team, and the British-born wrestlers were relegated to sparring roles. It helps that wrestling's national qualification rules seem to have been drawn up on the back of a fag packet after a six-hour lunch break.

Dreamy: British-born Leon Rattigan could miss out on the London Olympics
The World Championships even allow each country to select two team members that do not hold a relevant national passport. There are two other Ukrainians in British wrestling's World Class Performance Programme, Myroslav Dykun and Oleksandr Madyarchyk, bringing the full complement of convenient imports to five in a select group of seven.
Great Britain will have a minimum of three competitors in London, with an outside target of five: Stadnik, a European Championship silver medallist, is almost guaranteed a spot, while Dykun was a recent Commonwealth Games gold medal l ist and Krastanov came fifth at the 2009 World Championships in Denmark.
Leon Rattigan talks of his dream of competing in a home Olympic Games; but he's from Bristol and only got a Commonwealth Games bronze. Maybe he can dream of watching it on television instead. Shaun Morley, performance director for British wrestling, is full of the standard bull.
'They have been here for a substantial period of time and have put us in a position we wouldn't otherwise have been,' he says of his talented ringers. But that's the point. Drugs put you in a position you wouldn't otherwise have been, too, but use them and people want you thrown out of sport.
The studied manipulation of the rules, however, is indulged and perfectly legal. 'Our elite wrestlers are now regularly among the medal contenders at international events,' Morley continues, but that isn't true, either. Ukraine's wrestlers are the real medal contenders; they just come wrapped in a Union flag for presentation purposes, with the usual cheerleaders in complicit denial.