While Christine Ohuruogu celebrated her restoration to the British athletics establishment yesterday, European cycling’s ethical tailspin picked up renewed momentum when Deutsche Telekom, the German telecommunications giant, withdrew their support for the T-Mobile team.

Those two events were bookends to a day on which the anti-doping movement across sport appeared increasingly fragile. In Ohuruogu’s case, it now seems to have mattered little that she missed those out-of-competition tests. In T-Mobile’s case, the team’s demise has shattered the once-flourishing German scene and represents another collective failure by the athletes, sponsors and the sport’s governing body, the International Cycling Union (UCI), to instigate change.

Given Ohuruogu’s golden performance at the World Championships and the extraordinarily unquestioning support she has been given by the British media, the success of her appeal seemed inevitable. The argument that missing one test was careless, but that missing three was highly suspicious and demonstrated a blatant disregard for ethics, has been waved away by the British Olympic Association (BOA).

But would they have made the same decision if Ohuruogu had not won a gold medal in August? And what does the decision do to the morale of those athletes — and there are many of them — who strictly adhere to the testing programmes and yearn for the opportunity to represent Great Britain at the highest level?

In fact, the BOA’s decision to restore Ohuruogu’s eligibility for the Beijing Olympics has only undermined the good work that has been done by UK Sport to emphasise how critical out of competition and whereabouts programmes are to the fight against drugs.

Ohuruogu is an elite athlete, who should be as familiar with the ethical requirements of competing for Great Britain as she is with her daily training schedule. When 2007 Tour de France leader Michael Rasmussen was revealed to have missed a series of out-of-competition tests, he was accused of ‘playing the system.’ Talk to any athletes and they will tell you that out-of-competition testing and whereabouts programmes are at the very core of the fight against doping.

The efforts to restore credibility to T-Mobile’s cycling operation finally ground to a halt yesterday when the German sponsor pulled the plug. For many years, blissfully unaware that their highly-paid star riders — Bjarne Riis, Erik Zabel and allegedly, Jan Ullrich — were doping themselves, — Deutsche Telekom unwittingly bankrolled organised sporting fraud.

It is a bitter irony that those who have been trying to restore the team’s credibility have now lost their jobs, although general manager Bob Stapleton, the trouble-shooter brought in to clean up the mess, has pledged to continue with a new team structure, albeit on a lower budget. But what must Bradley Wiggins, who sought refuge with Stapleton and his clean image, after being pulled out of last summer’s Tour because of a positive test by a Cofidis team mate, now be thinking?

In a sport that has been torn apart by doping, out-of-competition tests, whereabouts programmes and blood ‘passports,’ strictly adhered to by all competitors, are now seen as a necessary evil. That realisation has been brought about through a decade of bitter experience, when the hollow mantra of ‘I’ve never tested positive’ was clung to by those under suspicion.

Yet some of cycling’s best-known champions of the past ten years — Riis, Zabel and David Millar for example — have never failed a drugs test. Their doping practices only became public knowledge when they confessed to them. They were never caught because until recently, they and their teams were far ahead of the testers and their creaking programmes. If cycling is now revealing an unprecedented level of corruption then that is thanks to better and more frequent tests and bigger budgets to test with.

Only the naïve would believe that elite athletes are not under intense pressure to succeed. Cheating, whether through doping, fixing or espionage, now comes in many forms. The rewards for success are immense, but with those rewards come a heightened ethical responsibility.

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