THE unravelling of British Cycling, so recently the poster boys for medal obsessives, has continued apace over the last week amidst claims that allegations of bullying within the organisation were largely ignored.

It is a particularly worrying story because no sport has greater potential to align with health and wellbeing projects, yet so much of what we hear about cycling completely contradicts that, whether in terms of the drug abuse that can cause terminal physical damage, or these behavioural issues that are potentially as harmful psychologically.

As is evident when visiting most of our Northern European neighbours, let alone Katie Mellua’s Nine-million Bicycles in Beijing, cycling can be incorporated beneficially into everyday life. And after all the high-profile successes achieved at Olympic Games and/or the major tours by Chris Hoy, Vicky Pendleton, Bradley Wiggins, Nicole Cooke et al, the promotional tools ought to be available to transform the UK’s unfriendly cycling environment.

Instead they are all now associated with an organisation blighted by accusations of having deployed tactics that have a comparable feel to those implemented by the most tainted of all modern sportsmen, secrecy and bullying having been their fellow cyclist Lance Armstrong’s stock-in-trade when engaging in the doping he reckoned was necessary to put him on an even playing field with rivals.

Armstrong’s win-at-all-costs attitude could be interpreted as dangerously close – in terms of philosophy rather than practice it must be stressed – to the “no compromise” line adopted by UK Sport when axing support for sports failing to show the necessary medal-winning potential.

To connect this last week’s theme, public investment in sport should only be justified on the basis of demonstrating benefit to wider society. In political terms a serious review is long overdue into the channelling of resources into activities that are available to a middle-class few, as opposed to sports with the potential for mass participation that are highly inclusive, of which basketball and badminton are the most obvious examples, reaching into communities that are often otherwise marginalised.

Until now the argument that youngsters will flock to sport as a result of seeing their compatriots collect medals has won the day in terms of justifying public spending. Yet as recently as the end of last year figures issued by the NHS showed that childhood obesity in the UK is on the rise once again. Whether or not the thinking behind the policy is questionable, however, what of the sporting outcomes themselves?

There are serious subsidiary considerations relating to the British Cycling mess in terms of the status their particular programme has been given for the past decade and more, repeatedly held up as an exemplar 
of all that is good in elite sport as it has been.

Any ambitious coach in any sport would obviously have taken that as his or her cue to find out as much as possible about British Cycling’s methods and seek to copy them, so there is every possibility that they have been employed across British sport.

There was evidence this week that realisation of the implications of that is dawning on the hierarchy when Liz Nicholl, the UK Sport chief executive who is the mother of the “no compromise” policy, was reported as saying:

“I think that every leader in every sport will be thinking, ‘I wonder if it could happen on my watch in my sport’. So it’s a real possibility unless there is good leadership, management and communication.”

Far from providing demonstrations of best practice, then, there is increasing evidence that elite sport can create monsters; coaches with god complexes who can manipulate any message to suit their ends.

One man’s bullying is another’s tough love, just as an insistence on creating a positive team environment can be an opportunity for would-be tyrants to assert themselves, avoiding all dissent by characterising criticism or failure to respond enthusiastically to commands as negative behaviour.

Neil Gibson, director of sport, performance and health at Oriam, Scotland’s new performance centre, recently co-authored an academic paper on this subject for The Conversation website in which he observed that: “We have yet to agree on the limits of acceptable behaviour when managing those whose goal is to be the ‘best in the world’.”

Whether that be misdirected peer pressure among players, dictatorial coaches, spin doctors who threaten to withhold access from those pursuing the truth, or even administrators who have it in their gift to fund publicly funded professional sports careers, it is time that we started working out exactly where those lines should be drawn.