To find out what happened, we need to go back in time.

Cycling has the strictest controls of any sport and we do blood controls as well as urine controls on a regular basis with guys who are at the top level of the peloton. And we can see through the parameters of the various elements of the blood and if things are being played around with more or less. We saw a few years ago that the values coming from Spain started to become a bit abnormal. At that time we informed the minister in Spain and we told him there was something going on and we asked him to look into it because nothing was showing up on the normal anti-doping tests . . . in other words we weren't getting positives. So he looked into it and more recently after I became President of the UCI (International Cycling Union) in September last, I started to make enquiries and I managed to get information about a particular doctor, Eufemiano Fuentes, and a laboratory that was involved in particular blood doping practices. So I wrote a letter to the minister in March and told him again we were concerned.

We also copied that letter and sent it to Wada (World AntiDoping Agency). In the letter to them I included the name of the doctor and the laboratory.

Wada are the people we work with in anti-doping and they work with governments.

So they would have the contacts to put pressure on countries and get a judicial investigation going. That was the end of March, and then in May we heard one of the director sportifs in cycling, along with the doctor, were lifted in a cafe in Spain. I'm not saying the information we passed on is what caused this situation, but it helped.

Unfortunately things were slow. We couldn't move on the issue because when I went to Madrid I was told the judge had put a secrecy act on the investigation. Nobody could access it and that included lawyers of the guys who were involved. Until the judge lifted it we couldn't get access to the file so when Jan Ullrich won the Tour of Switzerland recently we didn't know the names in the investigation.

Media in Spain starting using names but we need official information. That official information we only got at 10 o'clock on Thursday night after a lot of pressure from the UCI and the French minister. We needed to get the secret lifted before the Tour de France so we could act.

When we got it we acted on Friday morning.

Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Francisco Mancebo haven't tested positive because the practices they are involved in will not show up on an antidoping controls. We are talking about blood transfusions here. It's the old form of doping. You are taking your own blood out, treating it with this, that and the other and putting it back in. That won't show up on a test so you can only deal with it through other means like police. Ullrich said he'd take a DNA test to prove it wasn't his blood in the laboratory but we'll wait and see.

We'll start our investigation.

Nobody is sanctioned, they are only taken out of competition. And we are the only sport that will do that on suspicion.

If they are not guilty, well that's the risk we have to take to protect our sport. It's something which has been agreed by the teams. This is not a UCI rule, it's in the Code of Ethics of the UCI pro-charter.

And it's been agreed by the teams. All of the teams met Friday morning and they were unanimous. When the UCI provided the list of riders implicated, they would immediately pull therm. T Mobile (Jan Ullrich's team) had even taken the decision earlier.

But this is not just cycling.

This affair broke in Spain in May and it was also mentioned that there were footballers involved. Yet Fifa didn't go looking for the names of the footballers before the World Cup. But when we heard there were cyclists, we went looking for the names to get them out.

We can only look on the positive side of what we did.