Italian cyclist Riccardo Ricco thought he could get away with using a new generation of EPO at the Tour de France, but the testers still caught him.

Anne Gripper, the International Cycling Union's (UCI) anti-doping chief, believes the war against the cheats is finally paying off after years of work.

"We are always trying to stay ahead of what's happening," she told Reuters yesterday. "That's why the gap is getting smaller."

With the Beijing Olympics opening on August 8 cycling finds itself in a vicious circle.

Strong doping controls mean tainted riders are stopped, yet the sport suffers from bad publicity as fans wonder just how many racers dope.

Critics say other sports with less stringent controls get no bad press but lack transparency.

The problem for cycling is that not all the new doping tests work, at least according to Ricco, who admitted on Wednesday that he had taken a "super" version of the blood booster erythropoietin for this month's Tour.

"During the Tour they made a lot of tests... two were positive and in theory all the tests should have been positive therefore the method needs to be checked," Ricco said.

Ricco was yesterday given an open-ended suspension pending a full decision on the length of his ban.

The French anti-doping agency (AFLD) was in charge of testing on the Tour so Gripper declined to comment, although she was adamant about another debate raging in cycling circles.

World road race champion Marta Bastianelli will miss the Olympics after testing positive for flenfluramine, a banned substance she said she did not know was part of a diet product.

On Tuesday she goes before Italy's anti-doping prosecutor Ettore Torri, who enforced a ban on rider Alessandro Petacchi for having too many sniffs of an approved asthma inhaler.

Both riders have been desperate to show there is a big difference between their cases and that of Ricco. Gripper said she sympathised but that the rules were clear.

"The way the current prohibited list is done, it does try to make that distinction," she said. "If you take the example of Petacchi, he got one year.

"The full sanction is two years. It's up to the disciplinary bodies to come up with a ruling."

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