His contention may be challenged over the next few days but Dave Murdoch, the Winter Olympics silver medallist, believes that the gap between full-time professional curlers and their unfunded rivals is growing.

That he is prepared to say so on the eve of an event in which he and his team compete with three other rinks for the right to represent Scotland at the European Championships can only be viewed as a measure of confidence in the methods they are employing.

The four-team men's competition and a three-team women's event open at the Dewar's Centre in Perth this afternoon, both involving round-robin preliminaries in which each team plays the others twice, prior to a best-of-three final.

In the women's event, Eve Muirhead - who, like Murdoch, is a former world champion and also a player who won a first Olympic medal at Sochi - takes on rinks which are skipped by Lauren Gray, who was the fifth British bronze medallist as alternate for Muirhead's team, and Hannah Fleming.

The men's competition has added spice as Murdoch finds himself up against a rink led by Tom Brewster, who was the original skip of the Olympic rink which the former now leads. Brewster now heads up another team which is financially supported by the governing body. The other sides involved are part-time teams skipped by Ewan MacDonald - he went to the Olympics with Murdoch in 2010 - and Dave Edwards, whose rink lost to MacDonald's men in this year's Scottish Championship final.

Murdoch accepts that his rink and Brewster's, who defeated the Olympic medallist's men on their way to winning the Swiss Cup two weeks ago, must be considered favourites to contest the final given the time they spend training, but the Scot is also wary.

"You'd expect the two funded teams to come out but curling's a funny game," he said. "You can compare it with golf. You see Rory [McIlroy] putting in all the effort, then you see [Miguel Angel] Jimenez who can pitch up with his cigar and easily win a tournament; it can be a little bit like that. If you have a hot weekend and you can make a shot under pressure . . . "

All of which may be true, but this Euro playdown schedule should favour the fittest and the best.

Murdoch's personal record in the event suggests that he has been earning his money as he is trying to earn the right to play in the European Championships, through which Scotland qualify for the World Championships, for a 12th successive time.

While previous failures to win an Olympic medal had led to questions being raised about the value for money achieved through making the sport professional, he clearly believes that the sequence is at least partly a consequence of having had the opportunity to work on his game full-time.

"You see the difference even from two Olympic cycles ago," said Murdoch. "When you see the standard that people were shooting [in Sochi], it's incredible how skilful everyone's become.

"Literally a few millimetres can cost you a game now, whereas before you could get away with a few shots. The Olympics has taken it to a new level, fitness-wise, training-wise. Everyone's moved up a big notch."

He accepts that the Games has also had a negative impact on the number of people seeking to compete at the top end, but feels it is something the sport has to accept.

"I don't think it's unique to this country," he said. "You look at Canada and what's happening with the Brier [Canada's provincial championship, which is arguably the sport's greatest prize].

"[At one time] thousands of teams would enter; they had ice rink qualifiers, then provincials and then the Brier. Now you're seeing a huge drop in [the number of] teams. That's part and parcel of what the Olympics has done to the sport.

"It has made it more elite in that the average curler can't turn up and maybe have his day against the top guys any more. The top guys have stretched their legs and are so much more in front. They are dedicating their life to doing that and when you see that now, in all the countries, no matter where it is, the Swedes, the Swiss, that's part and parcel of what comes with being involved in the Olympic Games."

That in turn breeds some resentment, but again Murdoch is philosophical. "In some ways everyone would like to keep it the way it was. They really enjoyed the '90s and the early 2000s before it came to where we are now, but I think the curlers need to accept that the sport is moving on and we don't want to hold that back.

"Obviously we want to keep curling going in the community but that's the Royal [Caledonian Curling] Club's job, to encourage more people to curl. And off the back of what they see at the Olympics, they want to curl, but for some reason we can't get enough of them in. So it's not the elite who are keeping curling out, what the elite's doing is actually putting us in the shop window."

On his return from Sochi, Murdoch admitted to having had some soul-searching to do before he decided to carry on as a full-time curling professional. In domestic terms, at least, today is the start of the latest process of justifying that decision and that of those backing him and his team.