Last year's success at the Winter Olympics saw curling awarded millions of pounds of public money and yet the very best teams in the United Kingdom are apparently being charged £500 to enter the Scottish Championships which double as World Championship qualifiers.

Those involved in performance sport will tell you that pears are being compared with apples here because the money awarded by UK Sport is ring-fenced for the competitive end of the sport.

However further context is added by the experience of the last two weekends at which Scotland's top men's and women's open events have been won by Canadian and Russian rinks respectively.

Nothing wrong with that in itself and the organisers of both tournaments are to be commended for the extraordinarily diverse, not to mention high quality fields they managed to assemble, the Mercure Perth Masters attracting top class entries from three Continents, while last weekend's Glynhill Ladies International at Braehead had the reigning world champions in the field.

Providing the opportunity to play against teams of that quality without having to spend thousands on travel would seem to be a gift to young Scottish players seeking to raise their games as they try to emulate last year's achievements and become the next to gain some sort of stardom within the sport through Olympic or World Championship success.

Yet as early as October, when Pete Loudon, the former world champion who is chairman of the Perth event, issued a press release detailing the quality of the overseas field, he also registered concern about the shortage of Scottish teams entering.

In the end - with overseas teams outnumbering Scottish entries by more than two to one - a late withdrawal meant Loudon was among those pressed into action, the everyman nature of the sport demonstrated by the fact that the scratch International Select he helped form, pushed eventual winners Brad Gushue's Canadian rink, harder than any other team.

During the event Dave Edwards, the amateur whose team had beaten the heavily-funded full-time professionals to qualify to represent Scotland at the European Championships earlier this season, meanwhile registered his concern that the Scottish Curling Tour may be struggling to keep going due to lack of interest.

A week later there were two unfilled places in the roster at the Glynhill tournament and its chairman, Alan Sloan, echoed Loudon's sentiments in expressing deep disappointment at the absence of not only former world champion Eve Muirhead's rink, but of other Scottish teams who could have taken advantage of those vacant slots.

Like bowls, another struggling sport, this is a sport at which it is relatively easy to become proficient, yet impossible to master because of the variants involved - not least reaction to pressure - which should mean that it is one that can cash in more easily than most when it does get the sort of success it enjoyed at last year's Winter Olympics.

That is what all this investment of public money is meant to be about, creating heroes to encourage the rest of our citizens to adopt more healthy lifestyles.

Yet this most Scottish of sports, which was something of a laughing stock among the athletically-minded as middle-aged men and women scrubbing the ice with their brooms first arrived in the Olympic arena, has now become an exemplar of the dangers of the ugly, pot-hunting mentality among British sports administrators that has drawn comparison with the attitude, if not the methods, adopted by the East Germans in the seventies and eighties.

Instead of encouraging the growth of the sport it seems there is a growing resentment that a privileged , select few are gaining huge support to train and travel, while those who have every reason to believe they can beat them - as Edwards demonstrated this season - are expected to pay substantial sums for the right to take them on.

That we are spending the money on the wrong things is further demonstrated by a conversation I had this season with a very senior official in the Royal Caledonian Curling Club, the game's governing body, who explained just how limited the opportunities are for his own daughter to get on the ice.

Soren Gran, the coach who steered Dave Murdoch's rink to the Olympic final, has registered his shock at the lack of facilities as compared with his native Sweden and has also recommended a solution, by keeping the curling rinks open beyond the traditional end of the season.

The reason that does not happen at the moment? It is too expensive to do so.

Adding lottery funding to the public purse was meant to be about the greater good. Instead, it seems, it is at best failing to broaden sporting involvement and may even be killing domestic competition.