Golfers leave a hole in one Olympics

There could be no greater rejection of golf’s Olympic inclusion than the withdrawal of the world’s current top four. World number three Jordan Spieth yesterday added his name to the three previous Rio ‘refuseniks’ Jason Day, Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson. The Games start on August 5.

In principle, all four were in favour of adding Olympic honours to their CV, but obviously not enough to risk bringing the Zika virus back to their young families.

And this is the difference between athletes who need the Olympics and an Olympics that thinks it needs fabulously wealthy sportsmen like golfers and tennis players.

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There is a small risk of returning Olympians or their spouses giving birth to deformed babies in the years following attendance at Rio, but only those who consider the Olympics a career option have the privilege of withdrawing.

For several decades now, Olympic honchos have been treading a fine line between commercial populism and tradition by courting the world’s sporting A-listers. These include golfers, tennis players, footballers and basketballers. They are the same sportsmen it rejected for most of the 20th century under its strident amateurism code.

That long-entrenched resistance to professionalism was founded on a supposed striving to defend the athletic values of classical antiquity. But in reality it was more about asserting the ‘pure’ aspirations of aristocratic leisure, long after such values became a faded anachronism (the modern Olympics were founded in the late 1800s by a clique of European nobility and privileged males).

Amateurism’s last defenders famously predicted in the 1980s that the Olympics would be dead ‘in eight years’ if professional athletes were admitted, but subsequent history has proved otherwise.

The question of how far the pendulum should have swung to redress the Olympics’ Luddite past is now at last being tested by the insouciance of rich professionals.

An obviously concerned IGF president Peter Dawson admitted yesterday the absence of golf’s top four ranked players from Rio had “put the sport in a bad light”.