I'm with Geoff Burndred and those who did not cheer Jeremy Yates' win in last weekend's Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge.

Burndred, you will recall, pedalled across the line second, behind Yates, then vented his frustration that he had had to race a convicted doper.

Yates has been banned for two years after a positive test for the muscle-building steroid testosterone was confirmed last month.

His positive was known before the Taupo race, yet Yates, bold as brass, fronted, won and pocketed the winner's purse.

He slipped through a gap created by a delay in cycling officials processing the paperwork of the ban.

It was not a good look, and Cycling New Zealand may have been better to withdraw his racing licence and take the small risk of its decision being challenged.

Yates won $2000 at Taupo. To their credit, race organisers stumped up a winner's cheque for Burndred too - but the money is hardly the issue.

Yates should have been shown the door. There's no argument that he's talented, as his 2000 world junior road race title shows. But rather than talent, what has too often been shown to be lacking in professional road cycling is ethics.

That's why it shares a tainted reputation with the likes of track and field and weightlifting.

That reputation was earned generation by generation, decade by decade, scandal by scandal. From the suspicious death of Arthur Lindon in 1886, to fellow Englishman Tommy Simpson's fatal amphetamine-induced collapse on Mt Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France, to Michel Pollentier being caught a decade later with a contraption down his shorts designed to produce a sample of someone else's urine, to the Festina scandal of 1998.

On that occasion a Festina soigneur (team helper), Willie Voet, was caught en route to that year's Tour de France with his car packed with hundreds of doses of blood dopers, growth hormone and steroids for the nine-rider team.

Voet, whose job was to administer the drugs, was jailed and later wrote a book admitting to doping riders for 20 years without a single failed doping test.

The Festina affair put paid to the sport's spin that there was no significant doping problem and led to the formation of the World Anti-Doping Authority.

Yates refuses to discuss his failed dope test. Of the Taupo controversy, he said he submitted his entry with everyone else and it was accepted.

His father, Bryan, reportedly said his son's positive drug test was not newsworthy. Wrong. Doping is sports' biggest issue; its credibility is at stake. Joining the dopers is the most newsworthy thing an athlete can do. It can also damn him or her to a lifetime of denial.

When Yates' positive test first made the news in September, he told a reporter that the media knew more than he did.