When lawyers for UK Sport drew up the contract for British Cycling’s £30.6m funding agreement after London 2012 one clause seemed innocuous enough: “You shall fully communicate and provide information to us regarding the outcomes of the Peter King review.”

Four years on, however it is the basis for frosty skirmishes between Britain’s most successful Olympic sport and the body whose millions have allowed it to thrive.

On one side stands UK Sport, whose chief executive, Liz Nicholl, could hardly have been more damning about British Cycling on Tuesday. Not only did she accuse it of “a complete lack of transparency” and unacceptable behaviour; she also suggested it had provided an alternative facts summary of King’s review in late 2012, with no mention of bullying or warnings about the conduct of the former technical director Shane Sutton, which are said to be in the full report.

UK Sport accuses British Cycling of a ‘complete lack of transparency’ Read more

However, Nicholl’s actions spoke even louder than her tungsten‑tipped words. When she was asked whether there had been a cover-up by British Cycling, she nodded vigorously.

Yet in the opposite corner British Cycling is refusing to completely buckle, despite a year in which it has been battered from pillar to post. It insists that the King report’s “key findings and recommendations were shared in briefings with UK Sport and the British Cycling board”. However. it appeared to change little.

Last year the British Cycling team doctor, Richard Freeman, told the Guardian the King report was “an opportunity missed” and claimed the results were never shared with staff. “We never got the results in spite of various requests to see it. Nothing changed,” he said.

The Guardian was also told by a former staff member who contributed to the report that he had flagged up serious concerns about bullying of one particular staff member who subsequently left the team and misappropriation of British Cycling resources in the report.

A second staff member told the Guardian he had expressed serious reservations about Sutton’s conduct in the report and said the lack of action “reinforced the culture of fear and blame”.

Remember, too, that this is the same organisation that still cannot tell us what was in the package that one of its staff delivered to Team Sky for Bradley Wiggins on the day he won the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011 or whether it keeps a record of what its staff carry, particularly with regard to medicines. Why trust them now?

Of course, there is an easy way to discover the truth: publish the summary and the full report and be damned. But that will not happen while Annamarie Phelps’s review into the culture of British Cycling – already four months late – is still being finessed and fiddled.

The delay means the independent investigation into British Cycling, which began in April last year in the wake of allegations of sexism and bullying made by the sprinter Jess Varnish against Sutton, will have taken nearly a year to conclude.

Yet while we do not yet have the final version of the Phelps report, informed sources have made it clear that some of the reasoning behind Nicholl’s comments is that she, along with other members of the UK Sport board, is frustrated by British Cycling’s initial reaction to a draft version of it. Those sources said the report will contain “some pretty damning stuff” for British Cycling, yet some on its board are still displaying a lack of realism.

Meanwhile British Cycling’s former performance director Sir Dave Brailsford perhaps did not choose the best moment when he insisted earlier this month that “We were not sexist but we were definitely ‘medallist’,” – given that one of the issues Phelps is focusing on is the allegations that Sutton used sexist language towards Varnish, including telling her to “go and have a baby” when he told her she would not be in the team for the Olympics in Rio.

Meanwhile, other riders, including the former Olympic champions Victoria Pendleton and Nicole Cooke, backed up her claims there was a culture of sexism and bullying at British Cycling. Sutton, who left British Cycling last April, has also been accused of calling paracyclists “wobblies” and “gimps”. He strongly denies all charges.

Yet UK Sport must also shoulder some blame. Its duty was to oversee the governance and culture of British Cycling, yet it never asked for King’s full report or appeared to be scrutinising what was going on in Manchester too closely while sackfuls of medals were arriving from around the globe. It was their poster child. Its “no compromise” approach became the model for all other medal-seeking sports and the standard by which they were judged.

It would be no surprise if UK Sport was criticised by Phelps for allowing British Cycling and Team Sky to become too meshed together - and for not heeding the warnings that this might happen from the Deloitte report. But Phelps, without doubt, will save her biggest opprobrium for British Cycling when her report is finally published in a month’s time.