British Cycling stood accused of a cover-up of alleged bullying on Tuesday night amid damaging claims by UK Sport that it had been misled over an internal review that exposed a “culture of fear” in the sport.

The beleaguered governing body of the country’s most successful Olympic sport was hit with arguably the most serious allegation of the wave to have engulfed it after a summary of a 2012 report it provided to UK Sport was said to have improperly reflected “the actual facts” of the full document and smacked of “a complete lack of transparency”.

That report, which has never been made public, was produced in the wake of the London Olympics and was based on a review by former British Cycling chief executive Peter King, who is said to have been told about accusations of bullying on its elite programme as well as being specifically warned about the alleged conduct of now ex-technical director Shane Sutton.

UK Sport, which handed British Cycling £30 million of taxpayer and National Lottery cash in the four years up to Rio 2016, received a summary of the King report at the end of 2012 but did not request the full document until last year.

That was after an independent review into the governing body was commissioned in the wake of accusations Sutton had told former Olympic sprinter Jess Varnish to “go and have a baby”, had used the word “bitches” to her, and had called disabled cyclists “gimps” and “wobblies”.