Dave Brailsford - far right, with Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas - has defended the team, himself and Bradley Wiggins.
Team Sky principal Dave Brailsford has insisted the squad is clean, adding in its entire existence it had only every applied for 13 therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs).
But while appearing to committ to publishing all details of TUEs granted from now on, he qualified that statement by saying the individual riders would have to give their consent.
Brailsford has broken his silence almost two weeks after the Russian Fancy Bears hacking team published details online of the TUEs granted to a large number of star athletes from across a range of sports.
Team Sky leader Chris Froome and former leader Bradley Wiggins were on that list, though details of Froome’s TUEs had been known about before the leak.
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However, when it emerged Wiggins had availed of TUEs for injections of corticosteroid triamcinolone acetonide before the Tours de France in 2011 and 2012 and the Giro d’Italia in 2013 questions were raised about the ethics of the applications.
Some of those who have used the drug in the past, including David Millar who has served a two-year drugs ban, said the substance caused rapid weight loss of up to 2kg and increased power.
Brailsford, who said he knew of Wiggins's TUEs at the time, insisted the 2012 Tour winner had struggled with asthma for years and that the TUEs he had availed of, to treat pollen allergy, were legitimate.
He said in the future Team Sky would publish details of the TUEs it availed of - if the riders consented; adding none of the team’s riders would ever be pressured to cheat in any way.
Brailsford spoke to Sky News and to the BBC for TV interviews and said the key with some of those who pointed to the performance enhancing properties of the drugs Wiggins had used was that those riders had abused that substances.
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"Abuse is the key word, people have abused it in the past,” he said.
"But the question was, is there a genuine medical need? And given the process and the integrity of the process; there was a doctor and authorities who approved this...
“I didn't see any need to question this. I felt I could trust it.
"What I can tell everybody is that we are doing it the right way. It is 100 per cent a clean operation, we always look at the right thing to do.
“(We) have policies and process to make sure that we perform in the right way and people can believe in us."
Brailsford said he was hopeful Wiggins’s reputation would not be damaged in the long term.
“He is a remarkable athlete who has achieved so much in his career and as you can see from his records he has not been a systematic abuse of TUEs, he has had very, very few. It would be very unfair to allow them to tarnish his career."
He said while the team would now “look at having the consent of the riders to make all TUEs transparent” people should be aware that Team Sky had applied for TUEs very infrequently.
“I’ve spent a long time making sure that we’ve set up a team in what is a difficult sport that’s had a difficult past, to give riders opportunity to be in a team where they can absolutely do it the right way.
“There will never be an athlete in this team who is encouraged or even suggested to do anything outside of the rules, that’s just not going to happen.
“You can ask any rider on this team, past or present, whether he’s ever had a discussion with me about doping and the answer is no.
“I would never ever and never have had those types of discussions with them, and I won’t, because the whole of essence of what I’ve dedicated my life to is to try to create an environment where you can perform to the best of your ability clean.”
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