WHILE the sport of Formula 1 ties itself in knots over McLaren’s "team orders" at the Monaco Grand Prix, Fred Atkins looks at the vastly different ethics that govern the sport of cycling in his latest Tour diary entry.

WHILE the FIA probed McLaren’s "race strategy" at Monaco, the sport of cycling looked on and said: "What’s the big deal?"

In 2002 motor racing purists were incandescent when Rubens Barichello was ordered to let his Ferrari team mate Michael Schumacher win the Austrian Grand Prix.

Ferrari were fined $1m and although Sunday’s collusion between Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso was a little subtler, it still drew tuts of disapproval and an FIA investigation.

Yet at almost exactly the same time that Hamilton was conspicuously failing to bust a gut to catch his team mate, on the climb of Tre Cime di Lavaredo in the Dolomites, cyclists Riccardo Ricco and Leonardo Piepoli were openly "fixing" the result of the 15th stage of the Tour of Italy.

The Saunier Duval team mates had dropped their two breakway companions on the final climb before in the final 100 metres, Piepoli sat up and waved Ricco through to collect the stage win.

Eyelids would only have been batted had Piepoli actually contested the sprint.

As the senior rider of the two, Piepoli has already won a stage in this year’s race and leads the green jersey of the King of the Mountains competition.

Outsprinting his younger team mate would have been considered greedy and as unsporting as many felt McLaren’s instructions to Hamilton were.

Cycling is almost unique in the sense that it is an "individual team" sport and it is virtually impossible to win a professional race without the support of your team. The lone rider has nobody to shield him from the wind, nobody to help chase down rivals and nobody to disrupt the pursuit behind when he gets clear.

To cyclists it makes absolutely no sense to invest millions in your team, as McLaren have done, only to compromise your chances by allowing internal feuds to develop, such as the one that saw Ayrton Senna ram Alain Prost off the track.

Disobeying team orders earns you pariah status in the peloton. The most notorious episode happened in 1964, when Rik van Looy was "betrayed" by his team mate Benoni Beheyt in the final sprint for the World Road Race title.

Beheyt had the temerity to win the race himself and to this day Belgians regard him with the same level of contempt the French reserve for Vichy collaborateurs.

Those who cite this as evidence of a skewed moral compass don’t really understand the nuances of the sport, yet in other respects cycling remains almost permanently on trial.

No sooner were we granted a respite from the increasingly sordid Floyd Landis hearing, while the adjudication panel considers the evidence, the bad news void was filled by Bjarne Riis and his bears-defecate-in-woodland confession that he’d taken EPO when he won the 1996 Tour de France.

"I have made errors and I would like to apologise," Riis said.

"Like everyone else I’ve made mistakes in my life. This was my choice and my mistake and I have to take responsibility for it."

He then claimed, fatuously: "I’m proud of my results even though they were not completely honest. I’m coming out today to secure the right future for the sport."

Richard Virenque, seven-time King of the Mountain "winner" and convicted drug cheat, wasted no time in claiming that this proved he had been made a scapegoat for the excesses of the 90s.

Virenque remains nauseatingly popular with the French and it’ll be interesting to see how people react to Riis if he’s allowed to manage the CSC team during the 2007 race.

He might be cut the same slack Virenque has been shown - but for the sake of the clean riders who were robbed of their just rewards in the 90s it’d be nice if these unreconstructed cheats were finally showered with the contempt they deserve.