Inside Sport: UCI president Pat McQuaid

By Matthew Pinsent

Matthew Pinsent's full report is on Inside Sport on BBC1 on Monday 17 September at 2315 BST

It seems no matter who you talk to there simply isn't a consensus about the state of professional cycling at the moment.

There is a wide range of opinions about the sport and its top event, the Tour de France, and considerable debate about whether the ban currently served by drug cheats is a strong enough deterrent.

And, most crucially, nobody seems to be able to pin down the best route forward.

Wind the clock back a few months to early July and the appetite for cycling in Britain was sky high. Estimates for the turn-out for the first stages of the Tour went as high as a million people, as the recriminations from the 2006 Tour and the ensuing legal tangle between Floyd Landis and the authorities were forgotten.

And no-one could deny the sheer spectacle of the most famous bike race in the world being cheered out of one of the most famous capitals under clear, blue skies. If only it had stayed as trouble-free.

When the pre-race favourite Alexandre Vinokourov was thrown off the Tour for doping and then Danish rider Michael Rasmussen was withdrawn by his team for lying, it seemed the 2007 Tour was going to be even worse than the previous race.

The Floyd Landis case has badly damaged cycling's reputation

The media rounded on the riders and the sport's bosses with a vengeance.

But even in the midst of the storm there was confusion about what was happening.

The authorities claimed catching people was a positive step - evidence that the culture of doping in cycling was living out its last days and that cheats now knew they could no longer get away with it.

Some of the cyclists were adamant that a new generation was fast catching up with the old guard and there was a vital change of behaviour in the offing - Rasmussen and Vinokourov represented the bad old days.

But the squabbles that ensued seemed, at best, unseemly and, at worst, symptomatic of a sport descending into rather than climbing out of trouble.

The organisers of the Tour de France started hurling barely veiled insults at world cycling's governing body, the International Cycling Union (UCI).

The teams gave very varied responses. Some were outspoken in their criticism of the cheats and some were forced to eat their words within days. Cofidis, most notably, withdrew their whole team from the race after Cristian Moreni tested positive.

But throughout it all the people kept coming. The popularity of the event did not appear to suffer.

When German TV channel ARD pulled out of covering the race the Eurosport viewing figures soared and Spanish television reported record viewing figures for the mountain stages.

Tour fans were devastated when Vinokourov was found out

It is true that some sponsors have had enough but many more have stayed put. Whatever the headlines it was not easy to fathom what the public thought of the sport.

If you talk to the powers that be within the sport it seems the best way forward still isn't clear.

Pat McQuaid, the UCI's president, admits cycling has suffered from a culture of doping but is adamant he has the appetite to sort it out.

He claims that in the summer of 2007, when cycling was suffering another mauling, failed tests in athletics were given scant media coverage and the measures the UCI put in place before the Tour helped catch some of the cheats during it.

He also said he would consider lifetime bans for people caught in the future.

English rider Bradley Wiggins thinks lifetime bans would be a good thing but Scottish star David Millar, who has served a two-year ban for doping, believes sentencing should be on a case-by-case basis.

But talk to Bob Stapleton, the boss of leading team T-Mobile, and you get a very different picture.

He doesn't think the appetite is there within the sport to put things straight and claims cycling needs a top-down reorganisation to oust the culture of doping.

606: DEBATE What do you think cycling should do to show doping the door?

Stapleton says the rest of the peloton should take a leaf out of T-Mobile's book. The German-backed team has strict contracts with its riders to ensure full compliance with their rigorous internal testing regime.

However, talk to some of the other senior figures in cycling and they claim that the inexperienced Stapleton is naive and that the real force within the teams are people who have known cheats and even been part of doping themselves.

The only thing that everyone in the sport agrees on is that it cannot survive much longer if the biggest event in its calendar continues to be dogged by doping scandals.

How much longer will TV, the public and the sponsors stay loyal if more people can recall Landis and Vinokourov than the legitimate winners of the event?