Some people will be shocked that we have cut the funding for Olympic sports by £50million. Others will be shocked that we are still giving Olympic sports £246million up to the London Games of 2012. Some people will he horrified to learn that athletics will be getting only £25.1million, a cut of 5 per cent. Others will be appalled that athletics is getting any money at all.

What? All that money - at a time such as this - just so that people can run around and jump up and down and chuck obsolete weapons about the place? They'll only spend it on drugs. Who cares if one person can jump farther into a sandpit than some other person?

Think of all that money going to something as silly as sport: £16million on canoes, £7.6million on judo, £6.4million on modern pentathlon, whatever that is. And brace yourself: £26.9million on pushbikes and £27.4million on rowing. Fortunes are being flung away so that people can whiz around in circles and go splishy-splash down a pretend lake.

Why don't we give it all to the nurses? For it's always nurses that come in at such a point and I must say, if we could promise that my lovely niece Amy and her kind would receive money appropriate to their worth, I would slash sport's funding at a stroke.

Yes, and why don't we pay teachers a proper salary instead of cyclists? Why don't we put all the money into libraries? What about social services? Why don't we give it all to the arts, instead of these coarse, physical, unintellectual, unimproving pastimes?

But all these arguments fade away when we look at the way governments prefer to spend our spare cash. Nurses never seem to be the priority. Instead, governments splash out on things such as going to war with Iraq. Right now, we're giving it all to the banks: oh dear, Mr Banker, you have made a mess of things, here's 500 billion quid.

And if it's not banks, it's wonderful new road projects, such as the M4 extension they are planning. What's the route? Don't know, but let's join up all the beauty spots and Sites of Special Scientific Interest and any other places that are gorgeous and special and meaningful, and put the road there. And Lydd: yes, the Lydd airport development; the one thing we really need in the present energy crisis is an airport within handy reach of London - after all, we've only got four.

It is at least relevant to note that most of the funding for athletes comes not through tax, which is money that we can't avoid giving away, but from the lottery, which is money we give away voluntarily. The lottery might be described as Dream Tax, money levied so that we can tease ourselves agreeably with visions of an ineffably fabulous new life.

It is appropriate, then, that some of the lottery money goes to the dream-fulfillers of sport. All the same, some of the shortfall in funding - caused by the dropping-out of corporate investors - has come from central government. The Treasury has just chucked in an extra £29million, not for the nurses (or the banks or the roads) but for sport. Isn't that frightfully bad?

One of the problems about sport is that it is hard to explain, harder still to justify. To tell a fastidious intellectual that sport is good because it's, well, like, really great doesn't really impress such people. My colleague, Alice Miles, in a typically trenchant piece, told us the other day that we should cancel the London Olympics and hold them in Beijing; a rhetorical point, obviously, but a point nonetheless.

Ms Miles doesn't get sport and doesn't care who knows it. There is always something slightly contemptible about sport. You can despise sport without shame. It's different with art. If you demand cuts in the funding for the Tate Modern, the National Theatre and the Royal Opera House, you are a philistine, a lesser kind of person.

People who don't care about art have an uneasy feeling that they should. We're supposed to like art, or at least approve of it. It's supposed to be good for us. But sport is different. People who don't get sport can, without compromising their reputation for seriousness, regard sport and sporty people as ever-so-slightly despicable. There is an implicit suggestion that people who don't like sport are superior to the rest of us.

A.S. Byatt rejected this. She was asked about her television viewing habits in this newspaper some years ago. “I'm an intellectual and obviously - except for the odd thing on BBC Four - the BBC doesn't cater for intellectuals,” she said. “The only things I really watch are sport and 24-hour digital news.” Good on yer, A.S. Me, I think people who don't get sport are missing out on one of life's great pleasures and whether they do so as an act of will or of bewilderment, it is just another kind of philistinism. It is also a blindness, for sport really does do some rather remarkable things.

Anybody who doesn't accept that sport can raise the human spirit was not at the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing on the night of Saturday, August 16, nor watching (like an intellectual) on television. It was the night when Usain Bolt took wing, covered 100 metres in a mere handful of strides, the last few of them dancing, knees high, arms spread, ecstasy in every line of his body, the fastest man that ever lived, a world record, 9.69sec, and a stadium and a world were united in wild amazement that a man could do such things.

Is the achievement of excellence a trivial matter? Is the long search for excellence a thing of no account? Is it beneath us to consider that Yelena Isinbayeva soared over a bar the height of a two-storey building? Does it mean nothing that Michael Phelps won more gold medals at a single Games than anyone had done before? Is it not inspiring that thousands of athletes came to compete at the Olympic Games, some to fail, some to find despair, others to find fulfilment and to light up the world? Is it not worth paying a few quid for such things?

Though I would not take it from the pockets of the nurses, I would happily rip it from the war coffers and the highway builders' bulging bank accounts. And while it is good to spend money on the alleviation of suffering, it is also worth paying for things that add to the beauty and wonder of the world. Such as art; such as forests and wetlands; such as sport.

And is it so very much, after all? Rebecca Adlington, a Great Britain swimmer, received funding to train for the Olympic Games. She got £12,000 a year. She won two gold medals and I was there for the first one. Adlington won because she seized her moment, she stole a race she was not expected to win because she showed courage where others hesitated. Is that not a fine thing? She won her second because she was the fastest there is: isn't that a still finer thing?

As a result of all this, Adlington has received a massive boost to her funding. She now gets £24,000 a year. Me, I think that's pretty good value.