Golfers will take part in this year’s Olympic Games for the first time.

Here are the words spoken by one of the most lauded golfers of his generation last year when defending Scott Stallings after the American golfer was banned from playing on the US Tour only after admitting to an offence that had apparently gone undetected even though he was tested while using the banned substance in question.

"He was, in my opinion, trying to help his overall health doing something that every other citizen in the country has the right to do and it was taken away from him because he played golf for a living and I don't necessarily agree with that," said Stallings’ compatriot Phil Mickelson.

Doubtless unknowingly, Mickelson was using a version of the argument put forward by many of the medics who seek to justify some practices that are deemed illegal by the anti-doping agencies. In essence they argue that they are merely using chemistry to get athletes back to what would be their ‘normal’ physiological levels had they not over-stretched their physical resources in the course of endurance or high octane competition.

During the same press conference Mickelson was to observe that he eats potatoes because they are "the only food I know that helps increase your testosterone levels."

There is probably an interesting academic argument to be had as to whether eating potatoes to increase your testosterone levels, rather than because you enjoy the flavour or take them for other nutritional attributes, constitutes a form of doping, just as deliberately increasing caffeine levels by drinking coffee or energy drinks to excess would.

Either way the impression given was that at best there has been little effort made in the Olympic sport of golf to educate players about doping at a time when its exponents are hitting the ball way further than ever before.

Footballers will once again take part in the Olympic Games too.

In March this year the Scottish Football Association, whose players are entitled to contend for places in the British Olympic team, admitted that only eight doping tests had been conducted on players in the previous nine months and none at all in 2016 to that point.

Meanwhile the calls for Russian athletes to be thrown out of the Olympics grow ever more strident because of increasing evidence of what amounts to state sponsorship of doping programmes.

What makes some of us pretty uncomfortable about this is the juxtaposition between claims of officialdom being actively involved in such activity and the impression that authorities elsewhere are wilfully inactive in the same areas.

Football and golf probably should not be at Rio given that they fit into the category of sports in which the Olympics are not viewed by participants as the pinnacle of the sport, however they will be and, in the interests of fairness, must consequently be exposed to the same level of scrutiny as the rest.

In considering this it is worth reminding ourselves of observations made by David Walsh, the award winning journalist whose persistence ultimately brought down the most notorious drug cheat of all, Lance Armstrong.

“The good thing about investigating Armstrong was that there weren’t many rivals trying to beat you to the story. More than that, journalist friends would hear things, but rather than run with them, they passed them on,” Walsh wrote.

“James Startt, an American photojournalist in cycling who worked out of Paris, knew Betsy Andreu, the wife of Armstrong’s long-time team-mate, Frankie.

“Startt sensed there wasn’t an appetite in his own country for the story that Betsy wanted told.”

As we have seen in the Brexit debate it is far from uncommon to demonise those we do not consider our own in seeking to deflect from uncomfortable issues.

For believers in fairness, though, it might be worth considering wondering whether we should be pursuing organisations that have failed to implement testing procedures or individuals who appear to have hidden from testers with as much rigour as that to which we are exposing the Russians right now.

To that end it has been encouraging that, in the last few days alone, serious questions have been asked of both Sebastian Coe, the International Association of Athletics Federations president and Craig Reedie, the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency who hails from a very small country with a troubled doping history from David Jenkins to Willie Johnstone to Drew McMaster to Dougie Walker to Alain Baxter to David Millar.

Against that background those with the wherewithal to examine such matters might feel that just as the Russians are being scrutinised we need to show the appetite to find out much more about the level and quality of some of the testing being conducted in Reedie’s homeland which is referred to as ‘the home of golf’, housing that sport’s governing body and in which football is ‘the national game’.