The release of the long-awaited and much leaked Phelps report into the culture of the British Olympic cycling team this week fell at the peak of the racing season; after the Ovo Women’s Tour, the national road championships in the Isle of Man next week are followed seamlessly by the Tour de France, where all eyes will be on Chris Froome. At grassroots level, it is massively busy, as midweek events take full advantage of the long evenings. Summer time and the bike racing is hectic. The politics of bike racing are pretty busy, too.

The furore that followed the sprinter Jess Varnish’s removal from the Olympic squad in March last year and which led to the Phelps report has already had a profound effect. Take the report’s release as a moment to look back 18 months, and compare and contrast. At the start of 2016, with Rio on the horizon, the Olympic team hinged on one man: the Australian Shane Sutton. Variously loved, loathed and tolerated, Sutton had been at the heart of the whole thing since 2003, driving the show with a maverick passion that needed to be channelled, managed and mitigated if it was not to become damaging.

Annamarie Phelps’s report, and the King report that was released along with it, show the extent to which the team became dysfunctional during the Olympic cycle between Beijing in 2008 and London 2012 while Sir Dave Brailsford was preoccupied with setting up and running Team Sky alongside the Olympic squad. On that note, it would be interesting now to see the Deloitte report from 2011 into the Sky-British Cycling interface; MPs were told in December that it would be made public but that has yet to happen.

The King report states cycling has “no recognisable management structure” and speaks of “a culture of fear, intimidation and bullying” under an “autocratic leadership”. It adds “the present situation is untenable and must be addressed urgently”. In April 2016, in the wake of Sutton’s resignation, two contributors to the King review stated their astonishment that it had not been acted upon in full. The former British Cycling chief executive Ian Drake, who commissioned King and to whom King reported, was contacted for comment but did not respond.

Back in March, a massive action plan for change within the Olympic squad was announced. A recent call from a coach within the Olympic cycling team was more telling, as it indicated the scale of reform within the setup: a process of adaptation to a new world in which there are structures and protocols, where the coach may no longer dictate to the athlete but instead suggests what may work. My source indicated that greater democracy may have a price in terms of decision‑making and clarity of command but every good comes with a cost. Crucially, he spoke of people buying in, of a willingness to embrace change while at the same time wondering quite how it will pan out.

Scandals rarely come solo, and the Varnish-Phelps saga has been joined, in the past nine months, by the vexed question of the Jiffy bag delivered to the then Team Sky doctor Richard Freeman at the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011. There are common factors – a lack of governance, Sutton, Brailsford – and it is another warning of what can happen when those who run sport can become blinded by a purely results-driven ethic.

As to whether cycling in Britain – as opposed to British Cycling – is in crisis in this particular midsummer, that is a different question. The gap between the world of sports politics and the world of actual sport can be immense.

The Phelps report is of profound significance for the Olympic cycling team, and the men who govern and have governed the sport. It also matters to the whistle blowers, to people such as Varnish and the former coach Ken Matheson, who feel it has been a whitewash. At the bottom of the tree, it matters because young cyclists of ambition should not be aiming to be part of a system that is dysfunctional and lacking in humanity. The Jiffy bag affair is significant for what it says about the way Brailsford runs Sky and about that team’s ethical approach. It will, inevitably, impact on the Tour de France in a couple of weeks.

Out where cycling in Britain actually happens, at the Women’s Tour, at local track leagues and handicap races, the resonances this week seemed somewhat different. The crowds turned out in force for the Women’s Tour, which has pulled in a new name sponsor for this year in the energy company Ovo. The boom in local participation shows no sign of slowing down. If the figures for women entering my local round of the national omnium are anything to go by (six in 2015, 20 this year) the Varnish saga has not put women off bike racing.

The talk at the Dudley Grand Prix and the Shrops and South Staffs Handicap League this week was not about Jiffy bags and action plans, isolated mutterings about a hostile media and a distant governing body apart. For the organisers of the Ovo Women’s Tour, the main issue with British Cycling appears to stem from success rather than crisis: getting extra days to cater for councils who want to host their event (an issue shared by the organisers of the Tour de Yorkshire). It is not a sense of “crisis, what crisis” but there is a greater truth: the sense “out there” has always been that the actual sport takes place in spite of, rather than thanks to, the men who run it from offices in London and Manchester.