Your correspondent was almost insulted by the message that appeared on his mobile phone earlier this week since it indicated that my interlocutor had not read an article I had written for Monday's paper.

However, because it came from a kindred spirit, a friend and a regular reader - one who enjoys a wide range of sports - he was forgiven, not least because he was spot on with his observations.

"Don't tell me what happened in the finals," he said. "I'm watching it on the iplayer ASAP. Should be exciting. The total lack of print or news coverage means you are the only person who is likely to know what happened.

"What a difference a year makes. This time last year everyone was falling over themselves to tag on to them.

"So annoying . . . this is the sport where we got two Olympic medals 12 months ago!"

I wondered what he was on about . . .

On Sunday, Eve Muirhead and Dave Murdoch were in action at the sharp end, as they had been at exactly the same time last year, but this time in the Scottish Championships which double as a qualifying competition for the World Championships, as opposed to the Winter Olympics.

The point being made is that the "I was there" culture we are living in means that attention to sport from both the media and the public is overly focused on high-profile events rather than reflecting interest or involvement in sport itself.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with an official from Event Scotland while attending a badminton event - the renaming of the national body's headquarters in honour of International OIympic Committee man Craig Reedie - when he told me that they were not going to sell out a high-class judo competition in Glasgow, just weeks after Scots competing in that discipline had been all over our screens as well as the front and back pages, during the Commonwealth Games.

Presumably it, like last weekend's curling, was not considered a big enough deal by sufficient people to be marketed, promoted, reported and supported.

However what made those observations all the more timely was that it was only last weekend that I had put two and two together and realised that not only was a field of the highest class being largely neglected, but that world champions and Olympic medallists were effectively paying to entertain people.

It was earlier in the season that Pete Loudon, a former world champion who is now in charge of staging Scotland's biggest commercial curling event, outlined his concerns to me about dwindling numbers of players seeking to perform at the highest levels.

Among the reasons, he suggested, is that it is too expensive for those not funded by national programmes, to enter competitions and he cited the national championships as a particular example since the entry fee is £500 per team, even though there is no prize money for the winners.

Discussing that with some of the players at the beginning of last week they pointed out that there is a refund if they fail to make it to the finals, but in its way that only makes it worse, because it means that the biggest burden is falling upon the most successful.

Add in to the mix the fact that spectators were being ushered into the Dewar's Centre for free last weekend and the bottom line is that a field full of some of the best known players in world curling - look on most Canadian curling websites and it will not take you long to find pictures of Muirhead or Murdoch - are effectively paying for people to come and watch them perform.

There is another element to this in the case of those on the GB programme, in that they receive athlete awards to allow them to train full-time, yet I am assured that they, too, are expected to pay to enter the competition, which effectively means that money intended to help curlers improve is going into the coffers of the governing body.

In pointing that out I am not suggesting for a moment that any sort of deliberate scam is taking place, merely the sort of anomaly that arises as a result of a sporting society that has its priorities all wrong.

There are many contributory factors to that, but a significant element is the way that Scottish sport is promoted with the emphasis on glitzy events rather than encouraging real interest in developing quality competition.

Meantime, it is crucially important that we continue to try to defy that trend by doing what we can to provide the broadest possible coverage of sport.