A leading British cyclist was once dropped from the national team under suspicion of having taken performance-enhancing drugs. Other top riders have missed two dope tests, one away from the “three strikes and you are out” rule. And three British riders in professional road-racing teams have made phone calls to British Cycling's headquarters in Manchester with serious concerns about the doping situation surrounding them.

All these facts are offered freely and happily by Dave Brailsford, the performance director of British Cycling, because the track cycling World Championships begin in Manchester tomorrow and there are two glaring facts that run dangerously parallel.

First, British cyclists are set to win a decent haul of medals this week and may be Britain's leading group of medal-winners at the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer.

Secondly, cycling, for many, equals performance-enhancing drugs. This is damaging for British Cycling and unfair on those who ride clean. On the eve of Britain's home championships, it might have been more obvious for Brailsford to have kept doping out of the newspapers, but he has elected to persuade readers why they should believe in the Britain team and enjoy their success.

He does not suggest that British riders are insusceptible. Indeed, he has identified two windows when they need watching. First, when they are young and leave home for the first time to join the British Cycling academy in Manchester. “That is a big transition and they are desperate to make it,” he said. “Those kids are vulnerable.” And, secondly, when they join professional cycling teams. “They leave the set-up here and are pretty much on their own,” Brailsford said. “And you think, ‘It's the only thing they've ever wanted in their lives, for the first few months maybe results aren't going well and the doc or one of the old pros might offer them something.' That's someone who's vulnerable and that's where we need to be.

“So we'll phone them up and ask, ‘What's happening on the drugs scene? You been tempted? Anyone offered you anything?' There are three guys who have phoned up and said, ‘I don't like what I've seen.'

“When you are confronted with this for the first time and some b*****d might be about to replace you in the team, that's a hell of a situation. Our riders out on the road phone our coaches two or three times a week. They just know that we're really behind them.”

The clean culture, Brailsford explained, begins by instilling in the riders the belief that you can win clean and buying into what they call “performance by the aggregation of marginal gains”. “If you look at every single element that could affect your performance, be it sleep patterns, fish oils or whatever, and go after it absolutely full-on, you will get a natural performance enhancement,” he said. “It's all or nothing. We start off with our young academy riders saying, ‘Do it all and you can compete clean.'

“Herein lies our advantage: for 99per cent of those who take drugs, there's a point when it becomes a crutch and so they stop doing all the little things they might have done in the first place. They rely on the drugs to give them the performance boost. If you get someone who does both absolute full-on attitude and performance-enhancing drugs, too, then, yes, you have difficulty competing. But most of them don't.”

This culture is backed up by statistics. Aside from the normal dope-testing procedures, British Cycling carries out four in-house blood tests a year so it can monitor any sudden swings in the blood profile of riders. A better monitor, perhaps, is that every cyclist's workout can be measured physically - wattage, heart-rate, etc - “and if we see significant change, we say, ‘Hold on, what's going on?'

“I've always said to every rider who wants to ride for GB, we need to see their blood, we want to know what they're doing. And if there's any shadow of doubt, then I won't select them. We have built too much here to let it be taken away by somebody cheating.

“You've got to talk to people, you've got to know your athletes, know the ones who are more susceptible and you've got to be bold and talk to them. You [have to] front them up and ask, ‘Are you taking anything?' You push and push and push and you tell them, ‘If you want to take this risk, you could be ruining it for everyone else.'”

Another key point, Brailsford said, is that “there is an obvious difference between the road and the track. The culture of the road is different.” Does he believe that there are cheats on the track? “I think there are a couple,” he said. Brailsford will say only that they are Europeans. “You just have to watch who goes off to Mexico or Cuba for two or three weeks at a time,” he said.

Which poses the question: if track has such a clean name, why endanger it with his plans to set up a Britain road-race team? His reply is that the team would be run like the junior squad training in Italy. “They live and train as a team, so you keep an eye on them all the time,” Brailsford said. “They can't cheat, they're not going to start rigging up blood-transfusion units. It's not like a pro team who race as a team and then go back to the different countries where they all live. The great thing is you can control it.” Indeed, doping, for Brailsford, should not be such a taxing subject. Here is his cure-all method for road cycling. “With the amount of money invested in drug-free sport, I'd hire 20 doctors independently for the 20-odd pro teams and I'd send them to make sure they are clean: access all areas, stay in team hotels, travel on the team buses, go into people's fridges,” he said. “And swap the doctors round every so often so they can't be bought off by the teams. I don't care about human rights - you'd be respectful, but give us the training data, the numbers. It'd be like a bunch of detectives.”

The obvious flaw in Brailsford's brief is David Millar. Brailsford was with the British cyclist in the restaurant in Biarritz in 2004 when two French policemen arrested him. Brailsford was also arrested and questioned for five hours.

If British Cycling was the ultimate hardline organisation, it would never have been so closely involved in Millar's rehabilitation after his confession and two-year ban for taking a prohibited drug. For Brailsford, the Millar experience was “an eye-opener” and he “could have been more astute in picking it up. There was something about him that maybe wasn't balanced.”

On bringing Millar back into the fold, Brailsford said: “I tried to make sure he was all right. At one point I was genuinely concerned for the guy. I don't condone what he did for one minute, but some people do make genuine mistakes and they do have genuine remorse. They may be few and far between, but I don't think they all need to be thrown on the scrapheap.”

The Millar experience, he believes, has simply made him better at spotting and killing off the problem. “We've always set out to win the right way,” he said. “And it's really hard for guys like ours who are clean yet who have to live with any cloud of doubt. We are big on winning, but it's not winning at all costs.”

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