Italy's drug cheats have been using the country's test laboratory to improve their doping skills, it was claimed yesterday. And up to 700 doctors across Italy have been doping sportsmen and women at amateur and youth level - and there is now the risk of the Mafia muscling in on the market for banned substances.

The claims were made by Sandro Donati, head of the research and experiments division of the national Olympic committee (CONI) and who has helped bring to light the current doping scandal in Italian football.

The CONI's laboratory at Acqua Acetosa near Rome has been completely discredited and it's top official Emilio Gasbarrone sacked yesterday after it was revealed that only a fraction of footballers' test samples were ever checked for steroids and all records were destroyed.

But Donati claims in today's edition of L'Espresso magazine, extracts of which were published by ANSA news agency yesterday, that the lab has an even more sinister past.

"Between 1984 and 1986, FIDAL (the Italian athletics federation) athletes and weightlifters, who were using steroids with the complicity of their sports federations, were using the Rome lab for reasons that were the opposite of what they should have been.

"The tests were being carried out not to discover and to punish the athlete who was using drugs, but to establish precisely the right dosages and the time needed for all trace of them to disappear."

Donati also claimed that Gasbarrone wrote private letters to FIDAL chiefs about the "state of health" of their athletes in the days running up to major international meetings.

The claims drew an exasperated response from current FIDAL president Gianni Gola, who said: "We just can't keep going on with the continual pestering of these revelations. Let's have everything out now.

"Any serious authority ought to tell those people with something to say that they should say it now, once and for all."

Primo Nebiolo, head of the International Amateur Athletic Federation and a declared candidate for the vacant CONI presidency, said: "I've never heard of people working out the doping dosages for athletes.

"It doesn't sound like a particularly dignified job to have."

Donati also said that: "After 1987, the practice of doping simply exploded and not just among the champions, but also at youth and amateur level.

"It's possible to estimate there are around 700 doctors in Italy devoted to administering doping substances, and who often pass from one sporting discipline to another, from where things are more openly talked about to one which is more protected, as now seems to be happening between cycling and football."

Donati's warning also included the danger of organised crime becoming interested, claiming: "doping in sport is worth $3 billion a year - $600 million of that in Italy alone."

Meanwhile, French police yesterday questioned the director of the professional cycling team Francaise des Jeux as part of a probe into the doping scandal which marred the Tour de France.

Marc Madiot was being questioned at the criminal police headquarters in the northern city of Lille.

He and Francaise des Jeux rider Emmanuel Magnien had already been interviewed by police after a raid on their hotel during the Tour de France in July.

Earlier this month a judge placed the team's Belgian masseur, Jeff D'Hont, under investigation on doping charges.

The Festina team was expelled from the Tour de France after the team's director confessed to providing banned substances to his riders. Several other teams quit the race as the probe widened.

Another Francaise des Jeux rider, Christophe Magnin, was questioned by police last week.