Dick Pound, the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), has blamed Hein Verbruggen, the former International Cycling Union (UCI) president, for the worsening doping crisis in professional cycling.

“I can remember, long before I was involved in antidoping, discussing cycling’s ethical problems with Hein Verbruggen, when he was president of the UCI, before the Festina Affair,” Pound said. “I was saying, ‘Hein, you have got a real problem in your sport and you don’t seem able to deal with it.’ He said, ‘Well, listen – if people don’t mind the Tour de France at 25 kilometres per hour, the riders don’t have to prepare – but if they want it at 42 kilometres per hour, then I’m sorry, the riders can’t do it without preparation,’ as he called it.” The Festina Affair is considered the most significant scandal in modern Tour history. It revealed the extent of abuse of erythropoietin (EPO), the blood doping agent, during the 1998 event.

Pound has been appalled by the continuing decline in cycling’s credibility, accelerated by events during this year’s Tour. “A few years ago, the public watching the Tour might have said, ‘I wonder if any of them are using drugs?’ and now they say, ‘I wonder if any of them are not using drugs?’ That’s the price you pay, the price that all sports pay, for letting things get out of hand.

“If Verbruggen is upset about what I’ve said, then that’s his problem. He’s blaming those who observe that there’s a deep, deep problem and accusing them of being anticycling. It’s not anticycling, it’s antidoping.”

Verbruggen, now president of the Coordination Commission of the Beijing Olympic Games, was replaced as UCI president by Pat McQuaid in 2005. But Pound said that he never felt confident that Verbruggen, who was UCI president for 14 years, was prepared to “rock the boat” against cycling’s culture of doping.

Pound believes that Verbruggen’s skills were not right for the problems that cycling faced. “I don’t know what the UCI’s marketing objectives were, although I think that you could probably do some research and find that Verbruggen’s forte as a professional was in marketing.

“Doping is cheating and for the most part it’s organised cheating. You have to confront it. It is ethically wrong, fraudulent and causes misery for athletes and their families.”

While Pound has proposed a crisis meeting hosted by Wada over cycling’s doping problems, Patrice Clerc, the president of the Tour, and Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, have demanded the resignation of McQuaid, whom they claim is little more than a stooge.

Pound, however, is willing to work with the Irishman. “I’m waiting to see if [McQuaid] will be able to distance himself from Verbruggen,” he said. “I hope we can work together and leave Verbruggen to deal with what happened on his watch.”

Clerc and Prudhomme have scorned McQuaid’s presidency and instead accused Verbruggen of manipulating events on this year’s Tour. “It’s time to stop pretending that it’s not Verbruggen who’s pulling the strings,” Clerc said.

However, Pound is urging McQuaid to create “a paradigm shift”. “Up until now, the fight against doping has been pretty limited,” Pound said. “Now, with public authorities able to go in and seize evidence and question witnesses, it gives us a much broader ability to get the enablers, suppliers and the medical practitioners who are assisting in all this. It gives us a much more vigorous arsenal of weapons.

“There are sociopaths out there. That’s why we have a police force. That’s why we have security checks at airports. That’s an unfortunate fact of life. We’re now paying the price for the sports authorities letting this get out of control and closing their eyes to it.”

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