Let us imagine for the moment that golf was a decent game. Let us go farther and imagine that golf was a sport and not something that people do when they have given up sport. Imagine it was a game that involved physical risk. Imagine that it was a game during which it was not possible to smoke.

Imagine that it was a game that revealed character and truth as no other, that its action was filled with resplendent beauty, that the names of its greatest participants were bywords for grace, physical beauty and physical courage. Let us imagine that it was a game that touched my soul, as so many real sports do.

And do you know what? I still wouldn’t want it in the Olympic Games. I would still believe that it had no place whatsoever in the great quadrennial festival.

Today, golf is one of seven sports attempting to advance along the road towards Olympic inclusion. To the International Olympic Committee, I implore: just say no.

Not because golf is a pretty piffling pastime when you compare it with running a marathon, or diving from a ten-metre board, or rowing a boat 2,000 metres, or performing a backflip on a balance beam, or riding a horse over the most fiendish obstacles humans can devise for them. And not even because the only real reason for bringing golf into the Games would be money, golf and money being blood brothers.

No. The reason for keeping golf out of the Olympic Games is because an Olympic gold medal will never be the supreme prize of the sport.

The entire meaning of the Olympics is that a win at the Games is the greatest prize available to its participants. You get one chance in four years: you get it right at that one instant of time or you fail for ever. You live all your life in pursuit of this one moment and either you seize it or you don’t. There are no consolation prizes in a true, heartland Olympic sport. You’re either Usain Bolt . . . or you’re one of the other guys, can’t remember your name, sorry, have to look it up.

I have no gripe with tennis as a sport, au contraire. But tennis should be flung out of the Olympic Games tomorrow because no tennis player dreams of an Olympic medal before all else. No, they dream of winning an annual tournament that takes place in London SW19.

Meanwhile, golfers dream of the four annual major tournaments. If Tiger Woods won an Olympic medal, it would be a footnote on his CV. With Bolt, with Michael Phelps, with Sir Steve Redgrave, with Dame Kelly Holmes, the Olympic Games are how we define their achievement, how we define their lives.

If you bring golf into the Olympic Games, you make the Olympic Games a festival of second-best. It’s the sort of cosmic inappropriateness that the religious call blasphemy.

Comparison to Germany the ultimate compliment

The England football team finished their season, eventually, by beating Kazakhstan and Andorra. Not exactly mind-blowing, I know, but let us not sneer. England were required to be flat-track bullies and they played the part to perfection. It was not always thus.