Everything went backwards and there seemed to be no way out but while people might be cynical about it all, there are new regulations being put in place and they are cleaning up the sport.

There's a lot of hard work after being put in to root out those that have tarnished everything. That hass been successful and it's come to the point where there are large numbers confessing without always being found out. That has started in the last four or five months and a little while ago the UCI brought in a regulation where any rider who is positive gets the mandatory Wada twoyear sanction. Then they get another two years where they can't be employed by a protour team. That can destroy a career and rightly so.

As well as this the UCI have just recently brought out a charter and if a rider is positive he has to forfeit a year's salary in addition to the ban.

On top of that the bigger teams are investing a lot of money, sometimes up to 500,000, and I read the other day a team had tested all their riders 15 times out of competition and the results go through to Wada and the UCI. All of a sudden, that much activity makes it very difficult to cheat.

But it's been hard to take, especially with the revelations that came out after the Tour de France came here in 1998. Seeing it in England this week brought back memories of what should have been a wonderful occasion.

What came out after that '98 tour was a real shock for me after all the work we put in trying to get it here. We approached the government, approached the tour organisers, got money on board, worked out difficult logistics and suddenly people could see how accessible Ireland was from continental Europe.

The problem was what emerged later and the level of cheating that was going on.

Not being in the peleton it was a surprise it was so endemic. There were a lot of old boys who took over teams and kept going with their old habits while the drugs became more serious because you were no longer talking about pep pills, you were now talking about reorganising the body. Paul Kimmage's book was out at that stage and was being updated for EPO and a lot of people in cycling thought he was being inaccurate and overdramatic in what he was saying. A year on I met him and I told him he had got it absolutely right. I apologised for the reaction he got initially.

But I never had a moral dilemma about bringing the Tour de France to Ireland. I rode in the 60s as an amateur and never saw a drug in my life but I saw Tom Simpson die of amphetamines and this was always on my mind when I brought the race to this country. I just never realised how bad it was. I remember it was a very attractive start, it impressed the commentators, it showed various strands in Ireland pull together but that was all forgotten.

Had I known what was going on would I have still tried to bring it here? Well I'm not sure how to answer that and I suppose it's completely irrelevant now.

But things have changed and the tour is cleaning itself up. Cycling used to say there are a lot of drugs in other sports, not just our sport and, while that's true, people were missing the point. During the 90s there was a pressure to dope and to get results whereas now there is a real pressure not to dope because it destroys a career. Cycling has also taken on an Australian woman by the name of Anne Gripper and she is highly regarded and is now head of the UCI anti-doping operation. She's a serious lady.

So we are on the right track and I'm looking forward to the coming week and also to the new Tour of Ireland which gets going in August. This time, cycling on these shores can be remembered for the right reasons.

Alan Rushton was race organiser for the Irish stages of the Tour de France in 1998 In conversation with Ewan MacKenna