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Bunker Mentality is disgusted at the way one of the world's richest sports ignored its own principles of fair play to muscle its way in to the Olympics.

Golf has a reputation as a calm and gentlemanly sport - but there was nothing genteel about the way that it barged its way into the Olympics.

The Royal and Ancient game is one of sport's great financial, political and marketing powerhouses, and the way it used every ounce of its considerable might to earn a ticket to Rio 2016 was quite a sight.

Week after week, the world's greatest players were consistently pressured into making positive statements about golf's future as an Olympic sport. Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Annika Sorenstam were all wheeled out to add their blessing, all declaring loud and proud that putting golf in the Olympics was the best idea since the invention of shoes.

But it doesn't stop there. Those players who had made negative or lukewarm comments about Olympic golf in the past - conspicuous among them Ernie Els - have made mysterious U-turns in the past year or two, and added their voices to the chorus of support.

Squash and karate both had excellent claims to one of the two spots. If tennis, badminton and table tennis are included it's a nonsense that squash is excluded; and the same goes for karate, a martial art that is surely equally as deserving of a spot as Olympic sports judo and taekwondo.

Yet golf had a trump card, namely a summer of high-profile, high-TV rating events to keep the game in the minds of the decision makers - and give golf's organisers the chance to reel out a stream of press releases, put on media conferences and enforce broadcast of promotional films during the quieter moments of the Majors.

It was a relentless and brutally effective campaign that led to golf getting exactly what it wanted - and hats off to the guardians of the game for pulling it together. Even the structure of the campaign was brilliant, with R&A chief executive Peter Dawson acting as the helpfully non-American and non-profit making face of the Olympic golf movement, while the superbly-slick US PGA Tour business machine provided more or less everything else that was needed to make it happen.

But why did they bother? After all, we're talking about a week of tournament golf every four years for a sport that already dominates the back pages for four or five weeks a year. Golf doesn't need an Olympic competition.

But it's never been about competition. It's purely a question of money, and world domination - for merely enjoying Olympic status will now allow golf to plunder all sorts of government funds across the world to aid in its development.

Money that has been earmarked for the growth and survival of penniless sports struggling for sponsorship will now be channelled into a game whose protagonists can earn as much as a million pounds a week for a single victory.

China and India, with a combined population of almost 2.5 billion, are cited as the big prizes, with the development of the game in the two sleeping giants

But nowhere is golf more dominated by a tiny, super-rich elite. The idea is that a few million extra in government aid will help change that - but bringing golf to the impoverished millions of Shanghai and Mumbai would need infinitely more than that. It's like a man with a footpump trying to drain the Pacific; and it'd be laughable if it weren't also achingly sad for those sports who could genuinely have benefited from Olympic inclusion.

Golf might be a gentlemanly game that holds in high regard the ideal of fair play.

But the game's cynical, bullying manoeuvres to take the last seat on the Olympic gravy train are anything but fair.

Bunker Mentality / Eurosport