Better men than I have tried and failed to understand the workings of the minds of the International Olympic Committee but the reasoning behind their recommendation that golf and rugby should return to the Games seems refreshingly transparent.

In plumping for the two richest sports under consideration – karate, softball, baseball, squash and roller sports were the others – the IOC grandees have put cash at the top of the agenda.

Rather than asking what the Olympics can do for a sport, they seem much more concerned with discovering what that sport can do for the Olympics.

Rugby and golf have easily the highest profile and the greatest crowd-pulling ability of all the sports under consideration.

Indeed, they have flourished independently of the Games for the best part of a century.

This, argued the sports who lost out, gave them an unfair advantage when mounting their bids. Squash, softball and the rest spent money they could ill-afford to lose on a campaign that they felt was vital to their viability while, so they contended, rugby and golf chucked small change at a vanity project that they didn't need.

As far as golf is concerned that charge might well stick.

Tennis was in a similar position a couple of Olympiads ago when they mounted a similar campaign for inclusion. They promised the participation of all the top names and duly regained admission to the quadrennial sportsfest.

Apart from that, or so it appears from the outside, nothing much has changed. There has been no reported hike in either the numbers playing the sport, or watching it.

Largely because there have been no new frontiers to cross, there has been no change to the old world order. Golf is operating from a similar vantage-point.

Rugby, though, promises to be different. Even though the Rugby World Cup can now claim to be the third most watched sporting event on the planet, the sport is still relatively unknown in large areas of the globe.

In the USA and China, there are huge markets to tap in both the wealthiest, and one of the most populous, parts of the world. There is huge scope for expansion both in Africa, where Kenya is starting to hint at what might be possible, and in Europe, where outside of the Six Nations there is a massive potential for new audiences.

The Olympics holds the key. The game's governing body, the International Rugby Board, is counting no chickens – the recommendations still have to be endorsed at a full IOC meeting this autumn – but it believes that once the developing rugby nations get access to funds previously denied them because of their lack of Olympic status, there will be such an explosion of interest and participation that the sport's established hegemony – centred around the Tri-Nations of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, with England the only other northern hemisphere side to have won the World Cup – will soon be threatened.

And the seven-a-side version of rugby is the ideal vehicle to turn that threat into reality. With less of an emphasis on power and a mastery of the set-piece of line-out and scrum, the shortened form of the game has already thrown up exciting challengers to the established order.

Kenya are currently ranked sixth in the world at sevens while Fiji are former world champions and the likes of Portugal and Argentina are starting to hold their own against the big guns.

More important, as far as the IOC is concerned, is the development of a similar spread of talent throughout the women's game. Without that, rugby would not have made it through last week's ballot. So far, so good. The IRB are waiting until the decision is final before working out how to ensure that, come the Games, there is genuine global representation. If early indications are to be believed and the field is restricted to 12 teams, it will be hard to exclude any of the usual Tri and Six Nations suspects without establishing a series of regional pre-qualifying competitions.

If the top players are to be involved, and the likes of Bryan Habana and Shane Williams have already expressed an interest, it will be hard to prise them away from their paymasters for such a length of time.

There may be troubles ahead, but, in a year when the image of rugby has taken such a battering, those are troubles the IRB is happy to face.