FOLLOWERS of the Tour de France who want a clean race were encouraged by this year’s renewal. Riders gasped for breath when they reached the top of the mountain, many were exhausted by the third week and the tempo had a human feel. There were, of course, three positive tests so the race could only be described as cleaner than its predecessors.

Last week’s announcement that the German rider Stefan Schumacher had used the new-generation EPO drug known as Cera to help him win a Tour stage in July was evidence that the race still had cheats. It also demonstrated that if the 2008 Tour was an improvement, then what we have been watching for the past 20 years has been mind-bogglingly dirty.

Schumacher was exposed because Pierre Bordry and his team of scientists at the French national anti-doping laboratory at Châtenay-Malabry retested suspicious samples, something that happens all too infrequently. For decades , anti-doping scientists have analysed urine and felt certain that the athlete had doped but didn’t have the evidence to prove it. Don Catlin, the former head of the IOC-approved laboratory at the University of California, once said he saw 14 false negatives for every provable positive found at his lab.

Not for the first time, the French lab has led the way. In looking again at samples already tested at this year’s Tour, it has sent a useful message to those who continue to flout drug laws. It is encouraging, too, that in the light of the French lab’s discovery of Cera, the International Olympic Committee has chosen to reexamine samples collected during the Beijing Olympics.

This will take time. There were 4,770 tests conducted in Beijing, of which approximately 900 were blood samples, and a number of these will now be tested for Cera. It will be a surprise if any of these retests turn up positive because Olympic athletes were forewarned of the existence of a test for Cera by events at the previous month’s Tour de France.

How counter-productive was it for the authorities to announce their ability to detect Cera before the Olympics? Is the aim to minimise scandal or catch cheats, or, perhaps, to proclaim the cleverness of the testing? Yet there is more to praise here than to condemn. Clean athletes need scientists who don’t just look for the truth but pursue it, and we all need laboratory directors who don’t view false negatives as just part of the job.

Bordry also said that among the samples collected at this year’s Tour de France there are cases that point to blood transfusions having taken place, but names cannot be revealed because the allegations can’t be proven. In the past, scientists did not divulge this kind of information. Instead they invited us to believe that athletes who passed drug tests had not doped.

We have since learnt how feeble the testing was and how many athletes doped with impunity, only to be later exposed. If Bordry believes a number of the riders in the 2008 Tour were blood doping, the overwhelming probability is that they were. It is reassuring that he is still on the case.

It is time, too, for the anti-doping movement to address more aggressively one of the key weaknesses in the testing system. Under current regulations, there is nothing much that can be done when testers uncover irregularities in drug tests – values that indicate doping but do not prove it. If the scientists are convinced it is doping but don’t have the evidence for a safe prosecution, why not withdraw the athlete from competition until the irregularities have been explained?

Bordry has contacted the riders he believed used transfusions on this year’s Tour. He has also compared days when their blood parameters were irregularly high and noted how spectacularly well the suspected riders competed. When the blood values went back to normal , performance levels diminished astonishingly.

It’s called cheating and for far too long it has worked.