Throwing urine at athletes and accusing them of being cheats as happened to Tour de France leader Chris Froome is obviously totally unacceptable but it has served to highlight, yet again, the terrible legacy cycling has inherited from the Lance Armstrong scandal.

Cycling has long been tainted by drugs but Armstrong’s fall from grace that saw him stripped of seven Tour de France titles did more damage to the sport than anything that had gone before and, hopefully, anything that will come in the future.

Here was a so-called hero, someone hailed as super human, who had betrayed not only his fans but his fellow cyclists and effectively plunged a dagger into the heart of cycling which is now, rightly or wrongly, seen as possibly the most discredited sport in the world.

The shameful episode that saw Chris Froome drenched in urine and called a doper by an idiot in the crowd during the current Tour de France has led to further debate about why outstanding performances in cycling always raise suspicions of cheating rather than a celebration of human endurance.

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Froome, Team Sky and others involved in the Tour have blamed sections the media for influencing public perception by questioning outstanding performances like the one put in by Froome during Stage 10 when he left all his rivals trailing by a significant distance ie it must be drugs or, laughingly, he must have a motor secreted on his bike.

A clearly frustrated Froome said: “With my victory a few days ago, the way the team has been riding, there has been a lot of very irresponsible reporting out there. That’s unacceptable. It is no longer the riders who are bringing the sport into disrepute. It’s those individuals and they know who they are.”

Ok, maybe some commentators, including some former cyclists, are guilty of going over the top with their suspicions but the media are paid to give their views and with the Armstrong episode still fresh in people’s minds, they have every right to question whether the current elite cyclists are clean as the sport struggles to restore some kind of credibility.

Of course, they should always give the other side of the story and Froome, Team Sky and others need to be given a chance to prove that doping no longer has any place in their sport.

Froome clearly understands that he is paying the price for the misdemeanours of people like Armstrong.

He says his success is down to nothing more than hard work and claims he is open to independent tests to prove he is doing nothing illegal, and yet, even as I write this, part of me, quite wrongly I am sure, thinks ‘well, he would say that wouldn’t he.

Didn’t Lance Armstrong deny it all before he had to confess?’ I am not for a moment suggesting he had done nothing wrong, but…

It is sad that Froome and cycling in general has to suffer this kind of distrust and he himself admitted that it might take years for people to accept that everything he has achieved is down to nothing but hard graft and superb athleticism. He is probably right because athletics which went through a similar credibility crisis due to drug abuse is still not free of suspicion.

It might not be fair that Froome, Team Sky, or any other cyclist has to have their integrity questioned in this way but it’s not the media’s fault. That rests with the despicable Armstrong.