Wellington hope for Olympic team

Wellington School has impressive fencing facilities

Wellington School is hoping to persuade international athletes to use it as a training camp for the London Olympics.

The Princess Royal Sports Complex at Wellington High School is one of 600 venues that the London 2012 organisers have recommended to visiting teams.

Sports complex manager JJ Rowlands told BBC Somerset: "We built the facilities to try and make it a regional centre of excellence for various sports.

"We are hoping to attract one of the smaller teams."

Feature: Wellington School hopes to bring Olympic team to Somerset

The list of possible training camp locations for each sport will now be given to all international teams competing in the games, who will receive £25,000 to spend in the area if they choose a British base for their pre-games warm-up.

The £2.6m sports centre has been listed in the guide as having specialised facilities for fencing, wrestling, judo, taekwondo, table tennis, archery and handball.

The school has specialised handball facilities

But Rowland is aware that the school is now in competition with the hundreds of other venues also on the London 2012-recommended list.

"That¿s the difficult bit now, we¿ve got the status but there are 600 other facilities in the whole of Great Britain also trying to attract all these teams.

"A lot of the bigger nations will have already decided where they are going, but perhaps once Beijing is out of the way the smaller teams will start thinking of where they want to go."

A number of former Olympians are already involved in training at the school, including Gyorgy Felletar who competed in fencing. He was invited to Great Britain six years ago to train fencers and now works at Wellington School as well as helping teach other fencing coaches with the British Fencing Association.

He said: "It sounds very exciting and if it were a real fact that we could attract top fencers to come and train here it would be fantastic, for myself, for my fencers and for the sports centre."