One of the foreign born athletes ruled ineligible to represent Bermuda at the Commonwealth Games has accused the under-fire Bermuda Olympic Association of negligence and of wasting taxpayers? money.

Englishman Jamie Brown was one of three non-Bermudian triathletes to spend months training to qualify for the Melbourne Games in March, having not been told by the BOA that a 2003 rule change had made them all ineligible.

It also emerged last week that the Island?s Olympic body spent thousands of dollars sending Brown and South African twins Riaan and Evan Naude to overseas races, where the principle aim was to reach the qualifying standard for the Games.

Brown himself received funds to compete at triathlons in Chicago and Tampa last year while the Naude twins had their trip to the World Triathlon Championships in Hawaii paid for by the BOA.

At a meeting of the Commonwealth Games Federation?s general assembly in Jamaica almost three years ago, Bermuda along with 70 other member countries agreed that from 2006, no expatriates would be allowed to represent their adopted homes ? a rule in line with the Olympics.

?My take on the situation is that the BOA knew about this rule change but did absolutely nothing about it until the last minute when it was all over the media,? Brown said.

?I cannot understand why they failed to act on it and why there was any confusion. The rule change came in a long time ago and it was their responsibility to make sure everybody trying to qualify for Melbourne was aware of it. But they did nothing about it and it has now blown up in their faces.

?But the strange thing is that they were paying for us to go away and race. They even offered to pay for flights down to Australia to compete when their weren?t any races closer to home. God only knows how much that would have cost ? and this is public money we are talking about.

?Just to put it in perspective, of the five weeks holiday I took last year, four of those weeks were spent abroad at races trying to make the qualifying time. Now I wouldn?t say that this was a complete waste of time because I got a lot out of them, but there are plenty of other things I could have been doing with my life had I known I wouldn?t be able to go to the Games.?

When contacted, BOA president John Hoskins refused to explain why the BOA had been funding non-eligible athletes or to offer a response to Brown?s damning assessment of his organisation?s conduct.

Hoskins previously admitted that the BOA should have communicated news of the rule change to those affected.

His suggestion, however, that the athletes were also responsible for checking the eligibility rule before they began training has been fiercely rejected by the athletes themselves and Bermuda Triathlon Association president Stephen Petty.

Meanwhile, gymnast Kaisey Griffith had her appeal accepted by the CGF, as did triathletes Flora Duffy and Karen Smith.