My venerable colleague Doug Gillon and I have had our moments down the years but among the subjects on which we fervently agree is the right of women to fair treatment in sport.

Strange, then, to read his article making a powerful case against women's entitlement to equal prize money in sport and to find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with him once again.

In it Doug explained the realities of professional sporting life, which effectively comes down to market forces. I recommend it to anyone who has not read it: http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/other-sports/equal-pay-requires-level-playing-field.25723721

Doug tackled the question of why calls for equal prize money being made by Helen Grant, Westminster's minister for sport, were at best poorly thought through and at worst a bogus attempt at populism within certain communities.

His overall message is perhaps encapsulated in the single sentence: "If you can't put bums on seats, there is no commercial return, or justification, for paying equal prize money. It has nothing to do with discrimination. Whether we like it or not, it's simply dictated by the market."

That should apply right across the way we approach sport, yet somehow our politicians seem to see sport as an exception to the laws of market forces.

This has resulted in what amounts to a sense of entitlement in the sporting community, with a generation of sportspeople who believe they have a right to a living from the public purse because they work hard.

That, in turn, has allowed something of an administrative monster to be created, which distributes public funds on the basis of performance in sports that generate little in the way of public interest outside of major quadrennial events.

The taxpayer is paying full-time wages to an extraordinary number of young men and women that we only rarely hear about.

As with the cause of women's rights in sport, The Herald can lay claim to doing more than most in terms of covering these 'minority sports' which, put another way, are those in Scotland that are not football.

Beyond football and, in an odd way, rugby union, where the wages of those who play for Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors can to some extent be justified by revenues generated from five or six home internationals per year, there are very few cases of sportspeople who can put sufficient "bums on seats" to justify full-time employment.

That the minister for sport has engaged with the question of rewards in sport is, then, important because as things stand we have created a completely false market.

The distribution of athlete performance awards is essentially a vast public subsidy to a select few who have been identified as having the potential to win prizes at, in particular, Olympic and Commonwealth Games, as well as, in between times, things like World Championships and European Championships.

The argument made to defend this is that without public funding we would not have the success we have on the international stage because our sportspeople would be hugely disadvantaged compared with those from other countries if had to earn a full living on top of their training commitments.

What other countries do with their public funds is, of course, for them to worry about, but the crucial extension of this argument is that if we do not provide that level of public support then elite sport would, in the vast majority of cases, be the domain of the privileged who could afford to fund their own careers.

However, what has happened in reality, as demonstrated by the figures that have been regularly trotted out in recent times about the disproportionate number of Olympic and Commonwealth medals won for Britain and Scotland by those educated at private schools, is that those from privileged backgrounds are actually now gaining an advantage when it comes to access to public funds because of superior school-sports programmes.

The solution is a complete change of priority, with public money redirected into state schools to fund the sort of participation programmes that allow youngsters to get proper exposure to the widest possible variety of sports.

Our educators, who are so quick to evangelise about the needs of the whole child when it suits them, not least when trying to justify poor academic performance in state schools, should then be challenged to put in the extra-curricular work required to encourage participation in sport, which multiple studies are showing to be vital to all sorts of aspects of health and well-being.

Beyond that, we should let the markets decide. Youngsters are smart enough to identify at an early age whether they want a career in sport, which one best suits their talents and whether or not a market exists.

Within this there is a case for funding a bridge between youth sport and the full-time professional arena to ensure opportunity for all, but not to fund entire careers.

Here or abroad, either the prize money is available to compete for or it is not.

If not, then it is not the responsibility of the State to allocate funds to a chosen few, just so that our politicians can have their photos taken with medallists and can thereby claim to be doing their bit for sport.

All of which said, it is not just women who must be made to compete properly for their sporting rewards.