On Friday the men who run cycling will sit down in their headquarters outside Geneva to talk about the past and the future, and whether the two can be reconciled by the use of a truth and reconciliation process modelled on the one that brought a measure of peace and sanity to post-apartheid South Africa.

Their president, Pat McQuaid, is sceptical. In his view, solving South Africa's problems was a doddle compared to the mess in which professional cycling finds itself.

"Where you've got a white population and a black population who're killing each other over a number of years, that's one thing," he said on Monday afternoon. "Whether it works in anti-doping or sport is another question. You have to ask yourself, if you can set it up, who's going to give information? Are riders and managers going to come forward? I don't know.

"Will it stop people wanting to cheat? If they come forward – and that's a big 'if' – will it help much in the future? My personal objective is to work on today and tomorrow, the here and now, rather than the past. We do face the past. I've faced the past on several occasions since I was elected. But I prefer to work on developing a landscape for the future so that this won't happen again."

The United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) report, however, is not the end of cycling's exposure to scandal. Some time in the next couple of months Benedetto Roberti, a prosecutor in the Italian city of Padua, will release the results of a two-year investigation into the wider activities of Dr Michele Ferrari, who according to Usada was at the centre of Armstrong's doping web. When the Gazzetta dello Sport previewed some of its findings the journalist Luigi Perna wrote that cycling was in "a bottomless black pit".

McQuaid disagrees. The 63-year-old Irishman believes that in the seven years since he assumed the presidency of the International Cycling Union (UCI) cycling has made progress in the fight against doping, just as it did under his predecessor, Hein Verbruggen. The UCI can point to the introduction of haematocrit testing, which put an end to a succession of deaths of young riders overdosing on EPO, and to the invention of blood passports, even though the UCI's range of anti-doping weaponry has been limited by budget and science, as well as by disputes over which body should be doing the testing.

But it is hard to overlook the way they defended Armstrong for so long against what turned out to be well founded suspicions, and of the alacrity with which they welcomed his gift of $125,000, ostensibly to fund their fight against doping, at a time when rumours about his conduct were growing, or the opposition McQuaid expressed when Usada took up the challenge of uncovering proof of the cheating at the heart of the success of the US Postal and Discovery Channel teams.

A Dubliner, McQuaid is a former amateur racer who won the Tour of Ireland twice and the Tours of the Cotswolds and the Pennines in the 1970s. Having narrowly missed a place in the Ireland team for the 1972 Munich Olympics, he blotted his copybook by attempting to race under an assumed name in South Africa three years later, along with Sean Kelly, at a time when sporting contacts were banned. He had an interest in observing the political situation, he said recently, but he also believed that if businessmen were allowed to do their thing there, why shouldn't sportsmen, too? He was unmasked, losing the chance of a place at the next Olympics.

After retiring from competition in 1981 he went into team management, initially with Ireland's junior team, which included Paul Kimmage, the son of a former rival. His next step was into rider management and race promotion, culminating in his success in attracting the Tour de France to Ireland in 1998 – although the discovery by French police of a Festina team van containing copious amounts of doping equipment cast a shadow over Dublin's Grand Depart.

That same year, however, he was elected to the UCI, and promptly appointed to the presidency of the road racing commission by Verbruggen, who had entered cycling in 1970 when, as a sales manager for Mars, he persuaded the company to sponsor a team. The two have been in harness ever since, when Verbruggen was coming to the end of a 21-year spell in charge of the governing body in 2005, he shoehorned his protege into the overall presidency, having warned the voting members of the unsuitablity of the two other candidates for the post.

Now 71, the Dutchman, remains as the UCI's honorary president, as well as an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee – although David Millar called for his resignation this week on the grounds that the Armstrong "victories" happened on his watch. "There's nothing in the Usada report which implicates Mr Verbruggen in any wrongdoings," McQuaid replied on Monday, coming to the aid of his patron – even though he had responded to calls for his own resignation by erecting a defence based on the fact that he was not in charge during the era in question.

The decision of McQuaid and Verbruggen to pursue a libel action against Kimmage, a rider turned journalist and a prominent critic of Armstrong who questioned the propriety of their acceptance of the Texan's donations, certainly makes it look as though they are continuing to concentrate on the wrong targets.

"I would agree that Paul has been a consistent anti-doping advocate," McQuaid said when it was put to him that dropping the action against the author of Rough Ride, which blew the whistle on doping in the 1980s peloton, might been seen as a useful act of reconciliation. "I know him very well. I've known him since he was in his pram. I managed his amateur career. I was a good amateur myself in my day and I took a decision not to go professional. I went to college instead. All I've done, all my life, is work for the benefit of this sport. I will not accept to be called corrupt."

To many cycling fans, however, the organisation is failing in its duty. During Monday's press conference McQuaid was asked if his organisation had also started to investigate the mention in the Usada report of payments allegedly made to Dr Ferrari by two Kazakh riders, Andrey Kashechkin and the current Olympic champion Alexander Vinokourov.

The president of the UCI leaned across to one of his aides. "Have we?" he whispered. "Not yet," came the muttered reply. Once again, cycling's governing body had missed the break.