Cycling news - Team Ineos owner Jim Ratcliffe promises to pull money if doping is detected

The British chemical billionaire's company took over from Sky in May and enjoyed immediate success as Egan Bernal won the Tour de France over the summer.

However former Team Sky and British Cycling doctor Richard Freeman is currently going through a tribunal after allegedly ordering testosterone for doping purposes, and the use of performance enhancing substances would be a red line for Ratcliffe.

"Our chief counsel, who looks at compliance across Ineos, was responsible for looking at compliance in cycling," he told the Times.

"And if he ever tells me he has a concern, that will be it, done for us. The day any of that enters our world then we would leave cycling. I don’t think it will.

"We checked all the procedures, everything, doctors’ records. You buy a cycling team, there wasn’t much legal work to do but we spent a lot of time on due diligence on the team.

"We had external lawyers do those checks, looking at the procedures, testing. We took it seriously.

"The regulations when we bought, and the procedures in Team Sky, were the most sophisticated and rigorous in the cycling world."