It was business as usual at the Eurosport studios on Friday when David Harmon went to work. The 13th stage of the Tour of Italy had taken the race into the Alps and Harmon had been on air for 90 minutes when he brought viewers the breaking news from Denmark. “The word we are getting over the head-phones is that Bjarne Riis [the Danish winner of the 1996 Tour de France] has admitted using EPO,” he announced.

Harmon, whose cheerleading style is much admired by fans, shares the microphone at Eurosport with Sean Kelly, an icon of the sport, but the former world No 1 seemed suddenly subdued. “The questions will come tumbling out now,” Harmon observed.

Kelly did not ask any. “I shall leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions,” Harmon said.

Kelly did not draw any. Harmon returned to the subject three times before the end of the broadcast, but on each occasion Kelly had nothing to say.

THIRTY years have passed since the 51-year-old Irishman left his father’s farm in Carrick-on-Suir for the bright lights of a professional cycling career. The Flandria team in Belgium was his apprenticeship; Freddy Maertens, Michel Pollentier and Marc Demeyer were the masters to be served. The code of silence was to be respected like a Bible. In the jungle, they played by different rules.

Maertens would test positive during Kelly’s first season; Pollentier would be stripped of the yellow jersey (for trying to cheat the doping control) during Kelly’s first Tour de France; Demeyer would die at 32 with a syringe in his arm. Kelly kept his head down and never told the tales. It wasn’t his style to go spitting in the soup. He would always adhere to the first rule of the peloton. But where does that leave you when the walls come tumbling down?

Like Berlin, nobody saw it coming. In July 2004 the walls had rarely seemed stronger. The Festina affair of 1998 had blown over; Lance Armstrong was winning his record sixth Tour de France; and Bjarne Riis was as far from unburdening his soul as it is possible to imagine. The 18th stage of the race was a 166km ride from Annemasse to Lons-le-Saunier. After 32km a six-man breakaway forged clear and were chased and caught by Filippo Simeoni and Armstrong.

Armstrong wasn’t a fan of the 32-year-old Italian (Simeoni had testified to Italian police that he had been given EPO and testosterone by Dr Michele Ferrari, one of Armstrong’s inner circle) and some heated words were exchanged as Simeoni was pressured to freewheel back to the pack, where he was abused by a number of riders.

“I was protecting the interests of the peloton,” Armstrong, who has never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, explained to reporters. “The other riders were very grateful . . . I followed Simeoni. He is not a rider the peloton wants to be in the front group. All he does is attack the peloton, says bad things about the other riders and group in general. When I came back I had a lot of people patting me on the back.”

Two days later, shortly after the start of the final stage to Paris, Simeoni attacked again. “He threatened to ruin my career,” Simeoni told L’Equipe, the French sports newspaper, “so I attacked to show that I wasn’t going to be intimidated by him. When I was caught, Armstrong organised a chorus with [Filippo] Pozzato, [Daniele] Nardello and others and they started abusing me, ‘Bastard! Bastard!’ They humiliated me.”

There was no action taken by the UCI, the sport’s global governing body, against those who had abused Simeoni. “Not even a warning,” Simeoni says, “that was the most disappointing thing, but I had some support.

The Italian federation sanctioned Pozzato, who had said I was a disgrace, that I had spat in the soup.”

Simeoni’s testimony against Ferrari (and admission that he had used EPO) cost him a six-month suspension, but no front-rank team offered him a job when it was served. “Sometimes I regretted having spoken because the omerta always wins out,” he says, “and sometimes I’m sure I did the right thing. I told the truth to a tribunal. But what did it bring me? I was marginalised and nothing changed. It just got worse.”

For two years the circus continued and we watched in disbelief until May 2006, when a huge crack appeared. A Spanish doctor, Eufemiano Fuentes, had been arrested in Madrid on suspicion of providing doping services to almost 50 riders. The investigation had uncovered evidence implicating Jan Ullrich, the winner of the 1997 Tour de France, and Ivan Basso, who won the 2006 Giro d’Italia, and a host of other big names. Ullrich and Basso and seven other leading riders were excluded from the Tour de France and there was the usual waffle about “new beginnings” when the race left Strasbourg. Enter Floyd Landis, the first winner in the history of the Tour to test positive. The sport had reached the abyss.

Questions were being asked of Basso. He lied. Questions were being asked of Basso’s manager, Riis. He lied. Questions were being asked of Landis. He directed us to his lawyers (he is now appealing his conviction in front of a tribunal in California). The stink was so bad that even the UCI was jumping. “When I came into this job I wanted to clean up cycling and I will clean up cycling,” Pat McQuaid, the new UCI president announced. It was hard not to laugh.

“The UCI deserve a golden ostrich award for hiding its head in the sand for so many years,” Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour de France, observed.

With sponsors withdrawing and the teams under pressure to respond, none responded more admirably than the German’s, T-Mobile. They sacked Ullrich, who still denies he ever took performance-enhancing drugs, and restructured the team’s management; Rolf Aldag, a former professional, would be the new team manager. Two doctors from the University of Fribourg, Lothar Heinrich and Andreas Schmid, would police the team’s strict new antidoping controls. But the problems were obvious. Hold a mirror to most of the top professional teams and the story is the same - former riders who move up to become managers or masseurs or mechanics. They all understand the rule of silence. They all understand how the game is played. Aldag had raced with the team in the 1990s; Heinrich and Schmid had also served the team during those years. How were they going to defend themselves if the shit hit the fan? They were prisoners of their past.

Last month, Der Spiegel published extracts of a new book by Jeff d’Hont, who had worked with the team (then called Telekom) as a masseur from 1992 to 1996. According to D’Hont, Ullrich had been given EPO injections by Schmid and Heinrich in 1996. He also claimed that Riis had used the drug. Schmid and Heinrich refuted the allegations. Riis also denied he had used the drug. T-Mobile announced an immediate investigation and the doctors were suspended.

Three weeks later, the walls started to crumble. In an interview with the ARD television network last Monday, Bert Dietz, who had raced with the team from 1994 to 1998, admitted that he had doped with the team and had been assisted by the doctors. On Tuesday, another former rider, Christian Henn, confirmed the allegations. On Wednesday, Aldag and Erik Zabel joined the list. A few hours later, Riis announced plans for a press conference in Copenhagen.

The game was up. He came out with his hands up, the first rider to admit having used performance-enhancing drugs while winning the Tour de France. “I have taken doping. I have taken EPO,” he said. “It was part of everyday life as a rider. My jersey is at home in a cardboard box. They are welcome to come and get it. I have my memories for myself. The time has come to put the cards on the table.”

Indeed, but how many of his fellow team directors will follow? And when will the UCI accept its responsibility for the mess? Ten years ago, after a major doping investigation in L’Equipe that featured several rider testimonies, Hein Verbruggen, the then UCI president, responded in the time-honoured tradition of those who enforce the omerta.

“I was not at all impressed, not at all, with the accounts given by riders like [Giles] and [Graham] Obree [the Scottish former world champion had told L’Equipe that he was giving up the sport because he couldn’t compete with riders who were using EPO]. What we are dealing with here is guys at the end of their career who can no longer hang on. I found it cowardly, there is no other word.” Verbruggen is still the UCI vice-president and the second most powerful man in the Olympic movement.

“What we have seen this week,” Prudhomme observed, “is the end of a hypocritical system put in place back in the 90s when a miserable cycling was run by Hein Verbruggen. Not only the riders have to pay for he doping culture that we have to get rid of; those at the command of the teams, whether they have cheated or not, have to pay as well. The wall of silence is not totally broken but the wall is crumbling.”

Hall of shame

- While Bjarne Riis is the first winner of the Tour de France to admit to illegal doping, last year’s winner, Floyd Landis, may be stripped of his title. In stage 17, the American produced an incredible performance during which he beat his rivals by nearly six minutes. Less than a week after being crowned as champion, it was announced that a sample he provided after the stage tested positive for incredibly high levels of testosterone. The B sample also tested positive. He is appealing against the decision in a tribunal in America

- Three race favourites were kicked out of the 2006 Tour de France before it even started - Ivan Basso, the 1997 winner Jan Ullrich and Francisco Mancebo were banned after being linked to a Spanish antidoping investigation

- Organisers of the 2006 Tour of California boasted that no riders tested positive for banned substances, but later admitted that nobody had been tested for EPO, the sport’s most abused drug

- Last week Riis’s teammates Erik Zabel and Rolf Aldag also confessed to using EPO

- The lowest point came in the 1998 race, when French antidoping police raided team hotels, entire teams left the race in disgrace and two sit-down strikes by protesting riders stopped the race entirely