Jan Bartu, the Great Britain performance director, tried it once and didn’t like it. As national coach to the Mexico team, at the Pan American Championships in 1993, Bartu was present on the previous time that Guatemala hosted a significant international modern pentathlon event.

“The venues and facilities were rustic, they struggled to keep the pool heated and filtered, and they did not have enough horses,” Bartu recalled. “The fences were not right and most of the horses could not jump properly, 1993 was a disaster with the horses.”

For the sport’s biggest event of this year, Bartu does not expect the horses to be anywhere near European standard and he is concerned that local officials may lack experience. “Knowing the conditions there, I was not happy when they announced the decision to take the World Championships to Guatemala,” he said.

Dominic Mahony, Britain’s Olympic team manager, has reservations, too. “The 1993 Pan American Championships was the last time that the Guatemala Modern Pentathlon Federation was asked to host a major championships and they are not comparable to the World Championships,” Mahony said. “It is the furthest outpost I know of and it will be a big stretch for them [to organise] but it is about spreading the sport around the world and we have to put our faith in the international federation [the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne].”

The UIPM certainly has faith. “It is going to be a high-level World Championships,” Karen Myers, the UIPM spokeswoman, said. “I think they are doing a very good job.” The UIPM had chosen Guatemala, Myers said, in the interests of “globalisation and development”.

However, not only has Guatemala barely been heard of in the context of pentathlon — it has no international competitors to speak of — the choice of venue means that the World Championships are so late in the year that they come seven weeks after end of the traditional season.

The World Cup final, which normally closes the curtain, was staged in late September but this season has been extended into mid-November to get the best of the climate in Guatemala. The season, which started in early March, is into its ninth month. “Fundamentally, the strength of pentathlon is in Europe and all the European nations will be scratching their heads, thinking they should be finishing off autumn training, having a break, and coming back in January,” Mahony said. “But we have got to think ‘peak now, this is the big one’.

“It feels a bit odd but we knew about it two years ago. And it is the sort of test you put as a credit in your bank account for the challenge of going to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. It is about building mental toughness.”

Some 35 countries will be represented and, such is the rarity of top professional sport being hosted in Guatemala, that the opening ceremony will be attended by the President, Oscar Berger. If Bartu’s worst fears are confirmed, the opening ceremony may prove to be a precursor to chaos.

Staging five sports in quick succession on one day, involving 32 athletes and technical scoring procedures, is challenging for the most experienced of hosts. But Guatemala? “You can expect disruption in the timetable,” Bartu said.

Fearful as he is for the standard of judging, and the ability of local organisers to handle smoothly the scoring mechanisms and protests, Bartu’s greatest concern is over a paucity of top-quality horses. “The biggest danger is the unpredictability of how a horse is going to behave,” he said.

Over the past five years, three British women — Steph Cook, Kate Allenby and Georgina Harland — have won individual World Championships medals while several more have been won in team competition. Cook and Allenby have retired but Harland is ready for the challenge.

“It is going to be strange, an adventure,” Harland said. “What we are going to find in Guatemala no one knows. But we have enough talent in the squad, and a good enough support team, to be able to deal with whatever is thrown at us.”

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