Cycling: Spoke in the wheel as failed drug tests show work is still to be done

The election of Brian Cookson as president of the International Cycling Union (UCI) has brought the promise of sweeping change. There is unity amongst riders sickened by a past in which doping was almost a necessity to compete for a job. But still the anti-doping forces continue to discover cheats.

The Kazakhstan-based Team Astana, to which 2014 Tour de France winner Vincenzo Nibali belongs, has seen five of their riders - two on the UCI Worldtour team and three on the UCI Continental team - fail doping tests in the last few months. Two were caught using the banned blood booster EPO and the others anabolic steroids. Another rider, Roman Kreuziger, is being investigated for irregularities in his biological passport while riding for Astana in 2012. The crisis has left Nibali scrambling to distance himself from the "idiots", as he calls them.

However, David Howman, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, is encouraged by the work of the UCI and believes the systemic team doping that formerly plagued the sport has been extinguished.

"I think that the methods that were used during the 'Armstrong era' are probably not being used now, partly because they have been well published by a number of riders," says Howman. "I would suggest they have been examined by those who are running anti-doping programmes and loopholes have been closed.

"I would say the ball is firmly in the court of the athletes. The athletes are subject to persuasion by the team leaders and so on, and, if there are going to be bad apples in any of the barrels, then the UCI will want to clean them out. And, I think that's the job they are embarking on."

Britain's Team Sky, who have produced two of the three most recent Tour de France victors in Chris Froome and Sir Bradley Wiggins, have been praised for their policy of zero tolerance. Nobody employed by the team can have any connection to doping, past or present. Their model has been the subject of discussion with other teams who have approached team principal Sir Dave Brailsford, enquiring as to the practical application of the policy. This is one of the reasons why Brailsford believes the peleton is largely clean.

"I generally do think so. I think that if people have been trying to cheat, and, they are getting caught, that is important," he says. "People don't want to cheat, ultimately. I think there is a general movement in the peleton to where people want to be able to race clean. Also, I think the EPO generation is slowly retiring and moving on from the sport and we have a new generation coming through, and that new generation was never involved in the systematic doping of teams."

Neither Brailsford nor Cookson believe doping will be completely eradicated. Vigilance must be maintained indefinitely, they say. Cookson has pledged to avoid the stigma of cover-ups which plagued his predecessors.

"I think there will always be people who try to cheat in any walk of life, however effective your detection rates are, in any profession, in any aspect of human life," Cookson says. "There are cases where riders are still being caught, which I think is a good thing, because it shows the system is working and we are not covering anything up, we are not being complacent in any way."

The UCI licensing division reviewed the Astana situation and in a move which astonished many, granted the Kazakhstan team a UCI WorldTour licence for 2015. The matter is further complicated by the fact that Astana's Director Sportif is Alexander Vinokourov, who, in 2007, served a two-year suspension for blood doping then went on to win the 2012 Olympic road race.

At present Vinokourov is also being tried in a Belgian court on charges of bribing a rival rider Alexandre Kolobnev €150,000 to let him win the 2010 Liege-Bastogne-Liege race. Kolobnev is still under contract to Team Katusha, a Russian based UCI ProTour team.

The US Anti-Doping Agency's investig-ation of Armstrong uncovered the pharmacological extremes that his team went to to ensure they were consistently winning. He has since been famously stripped of the seven consecutive Tour de France victories he recorded from 1999. Those titles remain blank as officials were afraid to award them to another drug cheat.

Many of Armstrong's team-mates were forced to testify against him under oath, including the Colorodo-based Jonathan Vaughters. Today, Vaughters is the CEO of Team Garmin-Sharp which includes 2012 Giro d'Italia champion Ryder Hesjedal and the now retired David Millar. He believes former dopers can contribute to a clean sport if they are repentant as he is of his doping past.

"Yes I am upset about Astana, that unravels a little bit of the work people have done," he says. "That being said, those riders were successfully targeted and the drug testing was effective in identifying them and, to me, that is important.

"At the end of the day, I don't like it when you don't see anyone getting caught. If you go back to the 1996 Tour de France, which I consider the peak of EPO [use], nobody tested positive for EPO. Well, does that mean nobody is using it? No. I firmly believe that 100%, maybe 99%, were using EPO in the '96 Tour de France. You want to see the system working, you want to see guys testing positive here."

Vaughters has a positive response to the question of whether the current peleton is clean. He says riders these days don't view exceptional performances with scepticism as they did in the past. There are other reasons he believes the sport has turned the corner.

"Well I can't vouch for every single rider in the entire peleton," says Vaughters. "But what I can vouch for is that I am absolutely 100% sure that the riders I have are clean. I am looking at their blood profiles and they are very stable and I am looking at all the physiological and haematological factors. They all are indicative of an absolutely clean rider.

"And they are winning races and they are winning races on the world scale. Quite frankly, if there was an effective method of doping like EPO or blood transfusions or whatever, that was really changing the face of the sport like what happened in the 1990s, they wouldn't be able to win. It would be impossible. So, by default, you come to the conclusion that the peleton must have cleaned up, to a certain degree."

The Astana situation is another matter and one that troubles Vaughters. Admitting his own past makes it difficult to point fingers at Vinokourov, he thinks for a moment before saying: "If I had, what is it? five riders now on my team test positive for various elements like Vinokourov has, if that happened to me, considering my personal history, I should be banned from the sport forever," he says. "There is no excuse for a manager to allow that to occur in his organisation. And if he says 'I didn't know about it' or 'it was done behind my back', that's fine, but you still have to be removed. I hold myself to that, especially considering my history."

One of Cookson's first initiatives as president was to reach out to Wada to correct the adversarial relationship that had existed previously. His next was to establish an Independent Reform Commission. That commission has been investigating the depths of doping in cycling and will issue its report early in the new year.