Sonia O’Sullivan ponders the medals lost as a result of doping in athletics

“Well I still think of myself as the pre digital age,” says Sonia O’Sullivan, and she’s not just talking about music and photography. Because as an increasing number of athletes are banned retrospectively for doping offences she can’t help but wonder how many of them might have got away with it back her in day.

The drug testing, in other words, was sort of pre digital age, too: blood analysis was only introduced towards the end of O’Sullivan’s career, and the biological passport - which now catches out a number of cheats - didn’t exist at all.

“I actually remember when they introduced blood tests, for the first time, at the Zurich meeting, around 1999, or 2000,” she says. “That was seen as a big deal. Although then they said the blood wouldn’t actually be analysed for anything, because the process wasn’t approved yet.

“They certainly weren’t keeping any samples for retesting, like they do now. And you read some of the cycling books, about how they’ve gone back and really investigated things, and really exposed it. That doesn’t seem to happen in athletics. People seem to be more tight-lipped, about athletics, from that time.”

Not that O’Sullivan lies awake every night worrying about these things. She still believes now, as she did then, that the majority of athletes compete clean. That’s not saying she doesn’t feel she was possibly denied another championship medal or two by athletes with major question marks about their legitimacy, the obvious example being the Chinese trio who ran her out of the medals over 3,000m, at 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart, the product of controversial athletics coach, Ma Junren, whose athletes ran world record times still so far off the scale that it’s assumed they had to be drug-fuelled.

“You do look at some of their times, and wonder how’s that possible? But I don’t know if I got any of those medals now, years later, would they mean anything. It’s probably more about the statistics or the record books. That’s what people will be looking back at, years from now.”

Indeed they’ve been revising plenty of those statistics lately, including the results of the 2009 European Indoors, with Ireland’s Roisin McGettigan now promoted to third, after Russia’s gold medal winner Anna Alminova was earlier this year banned retrospectively for doping. Rob Heffernan is also due a bronze medal from the 20km walk at the 2010 European Championships, and likewise Derval O’Rourke, from the 60m hurdles at the 2013 European Indoors, again after the gold medal winners were found out to be cheating.

There are similar doubts about medal winners throughout O’Sullivan’s career, including her first appearance on the big stage, at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona: O’Sullivan was leading the 3,000m, around the final bend, poised for gold, before Yelena Romanova and Tetyana Dorovskikh, representing the Unified Russia, darted past. O’Sullivan was left to battle for the bronze, and narrowly lost out to Angela Chalmers of Canada. A year later, Dorovskikh tested positive for steroids - although she kept her Olympic medal, again as retrospective bans didn’t exist.

None of this, however, would stop her from encouraging her own two daughters, Ciara and Sophie, to pursue their athletics careers: “Well they play all sports,” says O’Sullivan, speaking in Croke Park to launch next month’s Liberty Insurance GAA Coaching Conference, where she’ll also deliver the keynote address.

“Sophie does run quite a bit, but she also plays soccer, and basketball, and would actually get most of her fitness from those sports. It’s only really when she goes to races that she actually runs. Ultimately she probably is better at running as she is any other sports, but we wouldn’t be pushing her into any higher level in one sport or the other. We’ll just have to see what pathways are there. But I certainly think athletics is still a great sport, and a great lifestyle, if you can get to a certain level. There will always be highs and lows along the way, but it’s still a fantastic sport.”

Even in the digital age.