Bradley Wiggins says David Millar's Olympic ban is right

Bradley Wiggins says there are legitimate moral reasons why fellow Briton David Millar should not be allowed to race at London 2012.

Millar was banned for doping in 2004, returning to action in 2006, but is still subject to the British Olympic Association's lifetime suspension.

"From a purely selfish point of view, it would be great to have Dave on the start line," Wiggins told BBC Sport.

"But [morally] he should never be able to do the Olympics again."

Last week, Tour de France star and Sports Personality of the Year Mark Cavendish said Millar had "redeemed himself" and that he would "love him" to be a team-mate at the Olympics.

Millar, 35, captained the British team that helped Cavendish win the men's world road race title in Copenhagen in September and won a silver medal in the time trial at the previous world championships in Melbourne in 2010.

Triple Olympic champion Wiggins added: "Sometimes we speak very selfishly really and it's easy to bury your head in the sand and forget about everything else.

"To have Dave in the team purely from a performance point of view, it would be fantastic for Mark [Cavendish in terms of] trying to win the Olympic Road Race.

"It would take the pressure off me having to do a massive job, because I can think about the time trial.

"But from a moral point of view, from what cycling is trying to achieve, from what cycling's been through the last few years, for what the Olympics stand for, he should never be able to do the Olympics again.

"The fact that we're still talking about it almost nine [actually eight] years after Dave first got banned for it shows how behind the times perhaps we are.

"If there's an inkling that someone can get back in, there's already a fault in the system."

Britain's national Olympic committee is now the only one in the world to maintain a lifetime ban for anybody who has served a drugs suspension of six months or longer, meaning Scot Millar will not be considered for Olympic selection.

That said, the International Olympic Committee was recently forced to drop a similar sanction when the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled in favour of a challenge to it from the World Anti-Doping Agency because the IOC penalty did not comply with Wada's code - a set of harmonised rules for sport that stipulates maximum bans of two years for first-time offenders.

Wada then challenged the BOA's by-law and Cas is expected to make a ruling on its validity in April, with many legal experts predicting Wada will win.

Millar is now an outspoken advocate for clean sport and sits on Wada's athletes panel. He is also the only British rider to have worn all three of the Tour de France's main jerseys (yellow, green and polka dot) and the only Briton to have led all three of cycling's grand tours (France, Italy and Spain).