There’s just no escaping those five, interlocking Olympic rings is there? In fact, thanks to big companies having outrageously lucrative sponsorship deals and endorsements with the Games, you can bring all the exhilaration, the excitement, the agony and the ecstasy of affairs at the XXXIII Olympiad right into the heart of your household appliances.

The marketing gurus at Procter & Gamble, for instance, are so giddy about their brand of washing detergent, they’re trumpeting it as a ‘Champion of Stain and Odour Removal’.

And why not? Nothing, after all, epitomises the dedication, the sacrifice, the athletic endeavour and the noble cornerstones of the Olympic ideal quite like a dissolving tablet that removes stubborn splatters and soilings at 30 degrees. Citius, Altius, Fortius and a’ that.

With everything going on over in Paris, it will soon be golf’s turn to get in on the act when the men’s event, featuring the new Open champion and current Olympic champion Xander Schauffele, tees-off later this week at Le Golf National, the host venue of the 2018 Ryder Cup.

You can probably remember when golf was re-introduced to the Games in Rio back in 2016 and everybody harrumphed themselves into such a state, the IOC were on the verge of including harrumphing as an Olympic demonstration sport.

A raft of high-profile players withdrew, using the flimsy excuse of ‘concerns over the Zika virus’, all and sundry were moaning about the humdrum 72-hole strokeplay format while crotchety observers grumbled and groused that an Olympic gold wouldn’t be the pinnacle of a sport that already has four established majors.

In a game that’s never quick to adopt change, the whole build-up was typically, well, golf.

Of course, after all the negativity and shrugging, sneering indifference, the golfing fare was pretty darned good as Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson served up a thrilling final-day shoot-out.

Those players who did pitch up genuinely looked like they were enjoying being part of something much bigger than themselves.

In a self-centred pursuit like golf, in which cocooned campaigners are often blinkered by an over-inflated sense of their own worth and surrounded by a clinging coterie of nodding sycophants in their isolated comfort zones, it was a refreshingly eye-opening occasion which they fully embraced.

A wider sense of perspective and duty triumphed over insularity. Golf and the Olympics seemed to get on like an athletes’ village on fire.

Here in 2024, golf gets another chance to sell itself on a vast sporting stage which brings exposure like not much else. Grow the game? This continues to be, well, a golden opportunity.

Let’s face it, when the Olympics are on the box, you tend to get into things that you’d never usually absorb. I’m not saying I’ll be nipping out to buy a second-hand boat to emulate the coxless pairs with the sports editor on Hogganfield Loch but the spike in interest in a whole series of sports can be considerable. The profile and publicity certainly won’t do golf any harm.

The return to Paris is a bit of a full-circle moment for golf at the Olympics. Back in 1900, it made its debut when the Games were tagged on to the Paris World Fair. Some 22 male and female competitors turned up in a come-all-ye gathering and battered away over 36-holes. The women’s contest was nine holes.

Because of the vagaries of the organisation, the winner of the women’s title, Margaret Ives Abbott, didn’t realise she was competing in the Olympics. She died in 1955, unaware that she had become America’s first female Olympic champion.

On the home front, meanwhile, David Robertson, a solicitor from the Shawlands area of Glasgow and, presumably, an avid reader of The Herald, finished third in the men’s event, with Walter Rutherford of Jedburgh taking second. They were Scotland’s Olympic golf trailblazers.

Who will blaze a trail to Olympic gold in the men’s and women’s events over the next two weeks remains to be seen. There will certainly be plenty of interest and intrigue generated by fields headlined by the aforementioned Schauffele, the world No 1 Scottie Scheffler, a wounded Rory McIlroy and Nelly Korda. Their presence gives Olympic golf great lustre.

In those weeks leading up to Rio eight years ago, Adam Scott, who was an early naysayer of golf at the Games, suggested it would be nothing more than ‘an exhibition’. How wrong he was.

Rose’s emotional, fist-pumping triumph showed what it meant. McIlroy’s admission in Tokyo a few years later, meanwhile, that ‘I never tried so hard in my life to finish third’ after losing out in an epic play-off for bronze underlined the lure of an Olympic medal. Its scarcity is its strength.

Golf’s Olympic movement seems to be gathering momentum. All these things take time to bed in, of course.

When Old Tom Morris and seven other gowfers gathered at Prestwick for the first Open in 1860, there were probably a few head-shaking, tut-tutting cynics propping up the bar in the Red Lion and muttering, ‘ach, it’ll never catch on’. Prestige doesn’t happen overnight.

At a time when participation continues to soar – there are, globally, 10 million more on course golfers now than in 2016 – the chance to spread the golfing gospel over the next fortnight is an opportunity that’s worth its weight in Olympic gold.

Now, let’s get into the spirit and switch that washing machine on.