Like many other people, especially in the insidethegames comments section, I had deep reservations about UK Sport’s funding announcement for British athletes over the four-year build-up to Tokyo 2020.

First of all was the way the announcement coincided with the publication of the McLaren Report a few tube stops away across London. The concept of burying bad news has been a major issue in Britain ever since Government advisor Jo Moore chose the inauspicious date of September 11 in 2001 to suggest in an email, subsequently leaked to the press, that it was a "good day to get out anything we want to bury - councillors' expenses?" UK Sport’s timing may have been coincidental, but they should surely have anticipated a parallel being drawn.

Then came the bombshell that archery, badminton, fencing, weightlifting and wheelchair rugby were all having their funding completely dropped from March 2017 onwards as £345 million ($434 million/€411 million) of cash was streamlined ruthlessly into the 31 Olympic and Paralympic sports deemed most likely to win medals. 

There were certainly inconsistencies in an approach by which badminton, for instance, was cut from funding despite the Olympic bronze medal won by Marcus Ellis and Chris Langridge at Rio 2016 while others, like modern pentathlon, survived despite drawing a Brazilian blank in August.

But the broader issue concerned the sheer brutality of a system which prioritises medal potential over anything and everything else. 

Yes, there are other grassroots funding programmes available, but should we really be cutting all financing of promising youngsters in team sports, where medals may be harder to come by but the opportunities for participation are greater? My colleague Brian Oliver has already cited the case of teenage weightlifter Rebekah Tiler, while the wheelchair rugby community rightfully feel wronged, particularly because the sport offers opportunities for those too severely disabled to compete in many other Paralympic events.

Another good example is table tennis, where England claimed a shock men’s team bronze medal at February’s World Championships in Kuala Lumpur before Britain reached the team quarter-finals in Rio. In four years’ time they should have serious potential, and this from a country that qualified no athletes for Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 and participated at London 2012 only by virtue of being host nation. One problem here is that the utter dominance of China makes it far harder to win medals than in sports - like rowing, cycling and sailing - where other sporting superpowers are less strong.

But what about the mantra of Modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin, I grumbled when this subject was raised last week: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well."

And yet, when the topic of conversation shifted soon afterwards onto the ongoing negotiations to extend the contracts of Arsenal Football Club linchpins Mesut Özil and Alexis Sánchez, I found myself trumpeting a different tune. 

Both players’ contracts are due to run out at the end of next season, and both could therefore leave on financially ruinous free transfers if no extensions have been signed. But negotiations are currently stalling because both the German and the Chilean are thought to be demanding weekly wages of £300,000 ($370,000/€356,000) - far more than Arsenal are currently prepared to offer.

Just to clarify, this sum of money is utterly preposterous. An annual salary for either player could, with ease, fund the entire British wheelchair rugby team on the road to Tokyo 2020, with enough left over to help a few weightlifters as well. 

But, equally ridiculously, it is also the going rate for world-class footballers these days. Sanchez has reportedly been offered an even larger salary of £400,000 ($495,000/€474,000) per week to play in the Chinese Super League. And, despite the poor performances of Özil in Premier League defeats against Everton and Manchester City over the past week, both really are that important for the future of Arsenal. 

In my view, Arsenal - a club brimming with financial prosperity now they have paid off debts following a move to a new stadium - should just roll up their sleeves and cough up. It might be a morally dubious sum and it might set a terrible precedent, but winning is more important. Losing both of these players would massively reduce the club’s chances of doing that.

But, hold on, is this not the complete opposite of what we are saying about UK Sport? So can we not take precisely the same argument there?

Britain’s increasingly superb performances at the last four Olympic Games has been due in no small part to this UK Sport funding. 

The ruthless and target-centered nature of it has been the foremost reason for its success, so how can we dispute that modern pentathletes have better Tokyo 2020 medal prospects than badminton players? 

None of us were complaining when Team GB were winning medals by the dozen during Rio 2016, a performance which, you could argue, gave the entire country a much needed boost as the population struggled to find common ground in the fallout of the Brexit vote. We might have been particularly happy to win in new sports like gymnastics and hockey, but we were equally content with an extra one in cycling or sailing as we desperately strove to hold off China on the medals table.

And, if UK Sport had decided to divert more funding into weightlifting and team sports and Britain’s performances nose-dived at Tokyo 2020, we would still have been critical, so they are locked in a lose-lose dilemma.

In our current age of professionalism, then, winning is surely more important than anything else.

But do sportspeople and clubs have an obligation to entertain? Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger certainly thinks so in a career in which he has largely advocated attacking football over pragmatic compromise. Many fans, however, would be happier to win ugly than lose playing beautiful football.

In some cases, we do accept that you can go too far in pursuit of winning. Russia’s state-sponsored doping programme at events including a home Olympic and Paralympic Games would surely be one example of this while, at a lower level, the use of Therepeutic Use Exemptions (TUE) by the Team Sky cycling franchise which has been so probed at today’s Parliamentary Hearing in London has certainly raised eyebrows as to what is morally justifiable.

Another good example came at London 2012, when badminton doubles pairs from China, Indonesia and South Korea were disqualified after deliberately trying to throw round-robin matches in order to ensure a better knockout draw. The incident, which was exacerbated by how these pairs were drawn against each other, was hugely derided afterwards. 

But I felt a small sliver of sympathy for the players concerned. In their view, they were simply trying to give themselves the best chance of winning overall and, in an era where future funding and positions in ever-more competitive national teams depended on their results, can you really blame them?

On the other hand, my two sporting highlights of 2016 were each moments of great sporting drama rather than great sporting achievement, albeit from two of the year’s biggest winners. 

One came in July when future Tour de France champion Chris Froome was forced to sprint up Mont Ventoux on foot after his bike was damaged in a crash during a thrilling mountain-top finish on stage 12 of the Tour de France. 

The second came in triathlon, when Olympic champion Alistair Brownlee sacrificed his chances of winning the World Championship Series finale in Cozumel in order to help his brother, Jonathan, through the final 700 metres of a gruelling race when he was in danger of collapsing from heat exhaustion.

Sport is also gloriously unpredictable. If UK Sport were choosing which Premier League teams to invest in, for instance, they certainly would not have chosen Leicester City last season...

A balance must therefore be found between ideals and pragmatism. Yes, we cannot be too harsh on UK Sport for chasing medals over anything else, and we have to accept that footballers are entitled to demand salaries too enormous for us mere mortals to contemplate. 

But, at the same time, let us hope that Coubertin’s creed does not flicker and die completely. For it is still the stories, the drama, the surprises and the upsets which excite us most.