To judge from Dave Brailsford’s words the other day it seems he still doesn’t get it. He was talking in a press conference about the business of the abnormally high salbutamol level in a urine sample taken from Chris Froome in Spain last September but not revealed – by this newspaper and Le Monde – until three months later. While re-emphasising his belief that Froome had done nothing wrong, he added that the finding should not have been made public.

But when Brailsford set up Team Sky eight years ago it was on the basis of absolute honesty and openness. We are going to ride clean, he said, and you can watch us do it. He gave every appearance of recognising that his zero-tolerance policy on doping would require the team to be transparent even beyond the letter of the law.

Instead Sky have given every appearance of gaming the system via their use of respiratory medications. When it was revealed by Russia’s Fancy Bears hackers that Bradley Wiggins had taken injections of triamcinolone acetonide before some of his biggest victories – to treat a medical condition, he said – despite having insisted that he never used needles and failing to mention the subject in his autobiography, many observers felt their suspicions had been vindicated.

The still-unresolved affair known as Jiffygate and the team principal’s unconvincing appearance before a parliamentary select committee confirmed them in their scepticism. It was reinforced by last month’s discovery of a letter from the president of UK anti-doping to the head of British Cycling criticising the unsatisfactory way medical supplies and records were kept by BC and Team Sky, two organisations whose functions and personnel overlapped in a rather opaque way at the Manchester velodrome, their joint headquarters. In that single document Sky’s fabled attention to detail was exposed as a sham.

Their ethical foundations were in effect demolished by the admission of the former coach Shane Sutton that the use of therapeutic use exemptions was pushed to the limit in order to find a gain – legitimately, in his view. Even if the team had done nothing illegal, it seemed that Brailsford’s high-minded aspirations had been put under pressure once exposed to the brutal reality of top-level competition.

As it happens, there was good news for Sky at the weekend when a 21-year-old from Colombia named Egan Bernal took the overall victory in his home country’s Oro y Paz stage race, against tough opposition. He is one of Sky’s new signings for 2018 but the temptation to get excited about his arrival is easier to resist than it would have been a year or two ago.

Sadly for Bernal and his team-mates the only thing that really matters in cycling at the moment is the fact that Froome will make his first appearance of the season at the start of the five-day Ruta del Sol in Andalucia on Wednesday in the glare of an unforgiving media spotlight and with what feels like the future of the sport perched on his shoulders.

The use of salbutamol, an asthma medication, is sanctioned up to a clearly defined limit. An adverse analytical finding does not trigger an automatic ban and is not made public until the athlete has been given the chance to present a case and the outcome is known.

It may not be a banned substance but its ability to enhance performance when used in large doses is the subject of debate. Twice the permitted level is quite a margin and Froome has spent the last few months trying to establish a plausible scientific explanation for what he sees as a freak result.

There is a flaw in the procedure here. When the finding was discovered, it should have been made public and Froome should have been given a strictly defined period of time – a month, say – to prove his innocence or accept a suspension. Instead the process of constructing a defence has been allowed to drag itself out from one season into the next, complicated by the question of confidentiality. Reports say it will not be concluded for several months yet.

The news of the findings cast a shadow over not just his victory in the Vuelta a España but, however unjustifiably, the four Tour de France wins in five years that preceded it. And now that shadow will hang over any race he enters until the matter is cleared up. That includes the Giro d’Italia in May, for which he and Sky reportedly negotiated an appearance fee of $2m. Froome has not ridden the Giro since 2010 and the box-office appeal of his attempt to bring off a clean sweep of cycling’s three-week grand tours is obvious.

To have it attempted by someone who is under investigation is considerably less attractive, however, and the Giro’s organiser has expressed the view that he would rather Froome stayed away if the case has not been resolved in his favour by then.

Should Sky’s number one rider win some of this season’s races with the possibility of ultimate disqualification hanging over him, those who finish behind him might be justified in feeling resentful. First, he will inevitably be attracting all the attention. Second, they stand to forfeit the pride of taking a victory on the road and the pleasure of celebrating it on the podium.

Some of those rivals think, along with the new president of cycling’s governing body, that he should act in the wider interest by suspending himself. Froome and Brailsford may have the letter of the law on their side but they need to stop relying on it and to start doing whatever it takes to rebuild some trust – not just for their own sake but for their sport.