I well remember the moment when it was announced that table tennis would be included in the Olympic Games for the very first time. I was at an England team training camp at Lilleshall Sports Centre in Shropshire and the coach halted the session so we could explode in a frenzy of collective excitement. The Olympic Games! The Greatest Show on Earth! And we are a part of it!

I was too young to qualify for the first outing in Seoul in 1988 but I was asked by the coach to drive up to the British Olympic Association HQ in Wandsworth to pick up the kit for Desmond Douglas and the other players who had qualified. I spent a good hour running my fingers through the specially designed shirts and tracksuits, gazed longingly at the five interconnecting rings on the breast, and dreamt ever more vividly about one day partaking in the Olympic experience.

Four years later, I got my chance, boarding a plane to Barcelona to play on the most glittering stage of all. I did not win Olympic gold in the Poliesportiu Arena, but the very act of performing represented the most momentous and vivid experience of my career. It was, to use the words of Simon Barnes, the day for which all other days had been preparation.

And it is for this reason that the idea of golf being included in the Olympics is anathema. It is why we should laugh at the absurd pretentions of the Royal and Ancient to squeeze into the Games and usurp its essential meaning. It is why, on Friday, the IOC membership should unanimously reject the recommendation of its executive board to include a 72-hole event at the Games of 2016.

The Olympics – if it is to mean anything at all – must represent the pinnacle of sporting achievement; the competition for which all other competitions are preparation. It must be the alpha and the omega, the be-all and end-all, the one competition to which our eyes as sportsmen are eternally focused, even as we fear the ruthlessness of its unique demands.

And yet we all know that professional golfers will never give a fig for the Games; that they will always be focused on the four majors – the tournaments with the history; that they will always regard the Olympics as little more than a novelty, a glitzy appendage to the serious stuff out on the tour.

The only possible reason to include golf is not because it will add to the grandeur or meaning of the Games but because of the viewing figures it is likely to secure in the United States and the hard cash that comes with it. It is a money-grabbing proposal for a money-grabbing organisation.