At one stage in Pat McQuaid's heavily stage managed press conference on Monday the president of the UCI paid tribute to the riders who had testified against Lance Armstrong in the long and agonising process of exposing the doping conspiracy that enabled the Texan to win a record seven Tours de France. "The UCI indeed thanks them for telling their stories," he said. Many believe that McQuaid and his organisation should have played a bigger part in exposing such a massive example of cheating.

To the 63-year-old Irishman, however, the UCI never had a chance. "I don't want to justify what happened," he said in a more informal conversation later in the day, "but it's very easy to sit here in 2012 and criticise the lack of action in 2002, 2003 or 2004. You have to work with the system in place at the time. Bear in mind that in the early 2000s there were not laws in place and police forces were not involved. It was left to international federations. Now it's a different landscape.

"All the UCI could do at that time was send samples to the laboratory. If they came back negative, then they came back negative. You can't do much more than that. We didn't have police powers to go any further. All we could do is say we were going to chase you. We caught loads of guys as a result of chasing them. But they [Armstrong's teams] had a sophisticated system and they beat the system.

"We couldn't put a gun on the table or a badge and say you're up in front of a grand jury, which is what happened in this case. None of these witnesses volunteered to come forward. They were subpoenaed by the police."

He described it as "a landmark day for cycling", although he refused to mark it in the way his detractors would prefer, by announcing his own resignation. McQuaid, a former amateur rider who twice won the Tour of Ireland, even made a plea for sympathy when, having refused to countenance the prospect of resignation, he described his experiences in the fight against doping over the past seven years.

"I was elected in September 2005 at the world championships in Madrid," he said. "On the Sunday prior to that I went to a dinner to congratulate the winner of the Vuelta a España, Roberto Heras. A week after I was made president we heard that he had tested positive for EPO. That was the beginning of my presidency. Since then I've had to deal with Operación Puerto in 2006, Floyd Landis in 2007, and Michael Rasmussen, Alexander Vinokourov, Andrey Kashechkin, Patrik Sinkewitz and the Telekom affair, in 2008 the Cera cases, with Bernhard Kohl, Stefan Schumacher and Davide Rebellin, in 2009 the [blood] passport cases with Danilo Di Luca, in 2010 more passport cases with Alberto Contador, in 2011 Ezequiel Mosquera and now Armstrong. It's been a pretty horrific seven years. But I'm optimistic, although there's still work to be done."

The biggest fish, however, was completely missed by the UCI, who now have been forced to accept the findings of Travis Tygart and the US Anti-Doping Agency. The governing body's deeper feelings may have shown through in the statement it produced when it criticised Usada's "on occasion animated and overstated language" and "intense involvement in the prosecution which not always serves the degree of detachment that one may expect from a disciplinary decision".

If intense involvement were what it took to persuade Armstrong's team-mates to give their incriminating evidence, then perhaps cycling needs more of it. "I'm grateful to Usada for what they achieved," McQuaid admitted, "but they needed the support of federal agents to do it."

He also refused to heed the call of David Millar for the resignation of Hein Verbruggen, McQuaid's predecessor, who was in charge during the Armstrong years and remains as honorary president. "Hein Verbruggen wasn't holding David Millar's hand when he stuck a needle in his backside," McQuaid said. "The riders have to take responsibility. They're adults. They know the rules and they know when they're breaking them. It's not the president's responsibility if they go into a doping programme."

But the current president refused repeated requests to say what he would like to see Armstrong do now, for the good of the sport. "I know what I'd like him to do but I'm not going to say. It's up to him to decide. From what I gather he's finished with cycling."

McQuaid was insistent that Tuesday marked a turning point. "This affair has been hanging over us for some time," he said. "This is the culmination and we can now put it behind us. We must take what we can learn from it and put in place measures so such a thing never happens again."

He declined to discuss the stories in last week's Gazzetta dello Sport previewing the findings of a two-year investigation by a public prosecutor in Padua into the activities of Dr Michele Ferrari, Armstrong's trainer, involving a network of Italian and Russian riders and secret bank accounts in several cities in Italy and Switzerland. On the face of it this is the uncovering of a scandal of almost equal and complementary weight to Usada's Armstrong investigation and is likely to shadow the sport for some time to come, although McQuaid refused to accept the Gazzetta's verdict that the sport is now in "a bottomless black hole".

"It's a difficult period," he said, with considerable understatement. "The UCI in one sense has had a great year. There has been some magnificent racing at the Olympics and the world championships. But this is a very critical moment for the sport."

Yesterday was an opportunity to take advantage of that critical moment and show that big decisions are being taken to lead cycling into a better future. Instead McQuaid conveyed the impression that, in the face of scandal and retreating sponsors, the sport is being offered more of the same.