The course of cycling through this decade and well into the next is likely to be dictated by two weighty documents and two key dates: the Usada "reasoned decision" into Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Service team on October 10th 2012, and the UCI's Independent Commission on Reform in Cycling (CIRC), which reported on March 8th 2015.

The CIRC report will not provide the end to the Armstrong saga but if Usada was the end of the beginning, this is surely the beginning of the end of that story, with various bits to be tied up, primarily the future of the former UCI president, Hein Verbruggen, for whom the 228 pages should have made extremely uncomfortable reading, backed up by condemnation from his successor Brian Cookson.

If Usada’s brief regarding the Armstrong era can be summed up as “what happened?”, the CIRC mandate was – primarily – concerned with the obvious follow-up question: “How was it allowed to happen?” Its findings regarding the Armstrong years are devastating. Covering up a positive test for a corticosteroid at the 1999 Tour was only the beginning, a prime example of the first misdeed that sets in progress a chain of further malpractice, culminating in the drafting of what should have been the key report into Armstrong’s misdemeanours by members of his legal team.

There were persistent suspicions that the UCI was too close to Armstrong, that it felt he was too big to fall, most notably from 2005 when details of the donations he had made to the governing body went public. Memorably, the then president Pat McQuaid had this to say when I put it to him in August 2005 that there might be a conflict of interest between the governing body accepting cash from its most famous rider while being responsible for looking into his potential doping: “Certain people might perceive it as [a conflict of interest] but intelligent people wouldn’t.” The “intelligent people” at the commission fortunately thought otherwise.

The first key outcome of the CIRC report is what it says about cycling’s willingness to move forward having laid its past bare. For an international sports governing body to subject its recent conduct to such close scrutiny is rare, with only the International Olympic Committee’s Salt Lake inquiry bearing comparison.

The commission makes the point – on page 211 – that sports governing bodies across the board need to be better monitored by the governments that host them. The prime lesson of the CIRC report is the long-term damage that can be done to a sport if power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual and at the same time scrutiny and accountability are limited: other sports federations should take note – and be worried. Very worried.

However, for all the impeccable forensic analysis of the UCI’s conduct during the Armstrong years and the relentless exposure of the constant need it felt to put the commercial interests of the sport – these were identical to Armstrong’s interests – above its integrity, the CIRC report is far from perfect. The respecting of anonymous sources is a worthy principle but it raises issues of its own.

Headlines

The dramatic, sweeping statements the CIRC makes about the health of amateur cycling, Masters cycling and professional cycling today make for impressive headlines. However, having competed as an amateur for 30 years, including at Masters level, they do not tally with the picture I have of those sides of the sport in the UK. Doping does not seem endemic in those areas to me: if it is being claimed that I am completely wrong, and that it is indeed endemic, surely I have a right to know on whose say-so? Similarly, if professional cyclists are being told that their side of cycling is up to 90 per cent doped, they have that right as well.

If anonymity is respected, we can only hope that the findings are based on witness evidence from watertight sources who have absolutely nothing to gain personally from claiming that doping is currently widespread within cycling. On that note, all credit to David Millar for raising the point that if CIRC has a potential weakness, it lies in the small number of actual cyclists to have contributed testimony – 15 per cent – from the CIRC analysis – of a total of 175 interviewees equals 26 or so.

Chris Froome is the only active cyclist willing to testify and go public about it, for which he should take immense credit.

A large proportion of the 16 riders/former riders listed as sources have been found guilty of doping. So how strong in the report are the voices of clean cyclists who are currently racing? Is there a risk that the picture of professional cycling in the report has been painted by such people as Alexander Vinokourov, Riccardo Riccò and Tyler Hamilton, whose integrity is very much open to question?

Hearts and minds

The headlines matter because, as Millar rightly points out, they will affect hearts and minds within cycling and outside. They should not obscure a broader issue, though: the commission comes up trumps on one key point, which is that any future assault on doping has to be based on openness and accountability, on which there can be no compromise.

The CIRC report also shows that progress has been achieved and how that has happened – tighter targeting, the inception of the Athlete Biological Passport, better out-of-competition testing, a culture change in some teams – and its suggestions offer a definite course for the future. To achieve that future, however, the UCI will have to take all cyclists with it – and therein lies Cookson’s biggest challenge.

Microdosing: A way of avoiding detection

One of the subjects dealt with in the CIRC report was the athlete’s biological passport, a longitudinal series of tests designed to track blood levels and thus be able to identify those who are using doping products. While the bio passport was originally billed as a way to eliminate blood doping, experts have since concluded that the use of small blood transfusions or microdoses of EPO or a similar product can still be done.

Microdosing refers to the use of very small injections. The quantities concerned go out of the system much faster, thus enabling athletes to evade detection. In addition to that, microdosing can be used to mask the drop in reticulocytes, or immature red blood cells, that tends to follow blood transfusions.