Cycling was dealt a crushing blow yesterday when Deutsche Telekom, the sponsor of the T-Mobile team, ended its involvement after months of doping revelations involving the German-based outfit and their personnel.

“We arrived at this decision to separate our brand from further exposure of doping in sport and in cycling specifically,” Hamid Akhavan, the chief executive of Deutsche Telekom, said. “We have worked very hard with the current team management to promote clean cycling, but we reached the decision to continue our efforts to rid all sports of doping by applying our resources in other directions.”

T-Mobile’s teams are set to race under the name Team High Road next year, according to their management company, High Road Sports. “We will review and adapt our operations and continue to advance our leadership position in athletic success and commitment to clean and fair sport that began during our work with T-Mobile,” Bob Stapleton, the American, who will assume control of the team after previously serving as manager, said.

Stapleton took over management of the German squad in the wake of last year’s Operation Puerto doping scandal, which centred on Jan Ullrich, the T-Mobile team leader. Despite Stapleton’s best efforts to challenge an ingrained culture of doping, his brief tenure was crippled by disillusionment with the sport in Germany, fuelled by further confessions and allegations of doping by T-Mobile personnel over the past six months.

“These issues have enormous visibility in Germany,” Stapleton said. “For Germans, this is one hundred times bigger than Barry Bonds [the baseball player who is alleged to have used drugs to improve his performance]. For a lot of good reasons, they’re saying enough is enough and I think Deutsche Telekom, which is 20 per cent state-owned, have been under pressure from all sides.”

The continuation of the team as High Road ensures that Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish, two of the squad’s British riders, will be guaranteed racing next year, albeit on a reduced budget, as they build towards competing in the Beijing Olympics next August.

Stapleton, who described Cavendish as “the best young sprinter in the world”, said that the team have to make “every dollar go as far as we can”. The damaging revelations around the T-Mobile team began in May last year, when Ullrich was first linked to the Operation Puerto investigation in Spain. The 1997 Tour de France winner was withdrawn from that year’s race and dismissed, but a steady flow of allegations, including confessions of doping from Bjarne Riis and Erik Zabel, the former Telekom riders, only hastened the team’s downfall.

Further revelations of doping practices by team doctors and other management staff dogged the team throughout last summer and came to a head in the autumn, despite Stapleton’s attempts to enforce an ethical makeover. “We’re moving ahead with a comprehensive antidoping programme, but I’m angry that there has not been fundamental change,” he said.

Stapleton also highlighted widespread reluctance to stamp out the sport’s drug culture. “Some people are not going to change,” he said. “There are people who want to win and that’s the only objective. Hopefully, some of those other teams will go away.”