THE above line, from Joe Simpson, the mountaineer who touched the void and escaped death, has been spinning round and round in the heads of some of the best young coaches in the UK. They were addressed by Simpson a month ago and were inspired. They have spent time this week learning from Michael Johnson, from Margo Jennings, Kelly Holmes’s coach, and from the vice-president of Cirque du Soleil — and have been inspired farther.

The idea is that three years and £1 million down the line, this uniquely privileged group will be the source of inspiration that beats the world. They are a group of nine, working under a project entitled Elite Coach; they are talented, lucky, hand-picked and fast-tracked. Should all go to plan, they are the sporting future, the ground-breaking coaches of tomorrow.

The perception that the UK too often falls behind in financing and administering success is reversed here. No other country in the world has a coaching project in which so much time and money is so concentrated among so few. Yes, the project has its roots in comparative failure. From Sven-Göran Eriksson to Bill Sweetenham we have foreign accents directing from the sidelines. Two years ago came a plea from the performance directors of the leading Olympic sports: lottery money is now financing the professional athletes, but we lack the coaches to coach them.

This is the response, a £1 million investment of government money, salaries starting at £30,000, 39 candidates put forward by various sports, whittled down to 14 and then nine after a day spent being examined performing roleplaying exercises by the leading headhunting company, Development Dimensions International. So highly are these nine coaches valued that they have been tied to contracts that prevent them from taking away their skills and working abroad for five years. The same will apply to the next intake in 2005, and so on. These are fatted calves that UK Sport, their new manager, wants to milk for all they are worth.

“It’s a dream job,” Graeme Randall, the former judo world champion who made it through selection, said. “We have been given an incredible opportunity to create a career. But it’s also daunting. We’re expected to bring significant changes and results. We feel we’re in a goldfish bowl, with people looking in, watching what we’re going to do.”

“It gives me a depth,” Tim Foster, the Olympic gold- medal rower, said. “It means I won’t just be copying the best bits of the coaches I had. They were great, but the sport moves on and so I want to be better than them. What excites me is the chance to learn.”

The emphasis is thus on broadening their education, travelling abroad to learn from other sporting cultures and other sports. They will spend time in global companies learning business attitudes to man-management and will be encouraged to spend time with the Cirque du Soleil to discover how a high-performance circus trains and develops its athletes. This is the Sir Clive Woodward approach: a quest for any knowledge from anywhere that might make a minutiae of difference.

We thus, for instance, have Randall on his way to learn from the success story in American wrestling. Nick Strange, another rowing coach, is off to discover how lightweight crews in Denmark, which has a small talent pool, produce such consistent success. Foster, meanwhile, is going sailing. “Sailing is much more advanced in boat preparation,” he said. “We clean and polish the hull in rowing because that’s what we’ve always done, but no one’s taken it to a scientific conclusion. Why do people sit that way in the boat? Maybe a change would be the difference between gold and silver.”

Randall wants to put eight of his judo fighters in one of Foster’s boats. “The road to the Olympics is so long and hard on your own,” he said, “so I want to take eight to the 2012 Olympics and I want them to be a team, to feed off each other, to support each other, just like in a rowing crew.”

To paraphrase Simpson, it is not for these nine to chance upon a winning formula, it is for them to choose where to find it. Their regular meetings to share their knowledge thus become a key to the project. “Fairly quickly,” Foster said, “we realised there was something we all had — that we’re all impressive people. You can see why each of us has been chosen.”