Nothing will ever replace the feeling of winning two World Championship gold medals, in near perfect succession, especially not 23 years later, although if someone pulled into Sonia O’Sullivan’s driveway this morning with two brand new ruby red Mercedes-Benz E-Class that might be some consolation.

That’s being a little facetious, partly because O’Sullivan actually feels like one of the lucky ones: if, as now seems increasingly certain, she was denied two gold medals at the 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart by Chinese distance runners on “large doses of illegal drugs”, then at least O’Sullivan went on to win a gold medal in Gothenburg over 5,000m two years later.

There, by the way, O’Sullivan also picked a brand new ruby red Mercedes-Benz E-Class – which at the time went to all gold medallists at the World Championships. Still, being a three-time World Champion would have a nice ring to it, although for O’Sullivan, nothing about the revelations out of China – that the athletes known as Ma’s Army were all doping – is particularly surprising: nor does it particularly matter whether or not those medals are ever retrospectively awarded to her.

“If someone drove up with the two new Mercedes, said ‘there you go’, that would be nice alright,” she says, reflecting on the revelations at her home in Melbourne. “But if someone sends me out two gold medals next week, then they’re just going to end up in a drawer somewhere. It’s not going to make any great difference in my life, how or where I am right now.

“Just knowing you were cheated out of something, knowing you were doing the right thing, knowing people were right to question those runners, you certainly feel better about that.

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“And if the results are ever adjusted, and I am a three-time World champion, that would definitely be hugely satisfying for me, to have your name in the record books like that. That’s what people will look at, over the course of history. It would definitely make me a lot more content about my overall career, what is written down in history like that.”

It may be that the absolute truth about the Chinese distance runners never comes out, whether that letter – allegedly signed by the nine most prominent athletes coached by Ma Junren – is verified or not. In the meantime, it does make for increasingly grim reading when it comes to the list of major championship medals that O’Sullivan was denied over the course of her career.

Just last November, Spanish distance runner Marta Domínguez was banned retrospectively for doping offences, having denied O’Sullivan the gold medal over 5,000m at the European Championships in Munich back in August 2002 (by .09 of a second).

Indeed, on her first appearance on the world stage, at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, O’Sullivan led the 3,000m around the final bend, poised for the gold medal, before Yelena Romanova and Tetyana Dorovskikh, representing the unified Russia, darted past in quick succession. O’Sullivan ended up fourth: a year later, Dorovskikh tested positive for steroids, and eight years ago, Romanova died suddenly of unknown causes, at the age of 43.

There are certainly other cases, the truths of which may never be revealed, sooner or later. O'Sullivan admits she wasn't expecting the truth about the Chinese distance runners to emerge, especially not the way it did: she woke up in Melbourne early on Friday morning, local time, checked her emails, and among them was one sent Jason Barry, the Irish actor (of Love/Hate fame, among other things) now based in LA: she knew Barry was into his running and had met him a few times in recent years, but had no idea what he was about to reveal.

“In the subject line it just said “shameful, it really is . . .” then a link to a Chinese website. Jason was probably the most unlikely person I expected to get an email from, so I presumed it was just spam, was about to delete it, but for some reason I still opened it, and couldn’t believe it.

“I’d certainly never heard of this letter, no. There was never any talk of it. In some ways it still sounds a little like a Chinese whisper. Unless you see some written in hard print it’s difficult to know what to believe. Then you think if there’s smoke, there is fire, and more people might start digging around even more. But the other question is why it took this long.

“Because people always had their doubts about the Chinese. Back then not everyone was willing to point the finger. But it was strangest time ever, everyone was calling it the ‘Chinese takeaway’, because they came along, set these records and won all these titles, and then in 1994 and 1995 were nowhere to be seen.

“Talk to my old coach, Alan Storey. He would always be talking about this stuff. But I just didn’t want to hear it, because I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t want to get involved. I felt it wasn’t going to do me any good to get annoyed about it. That was method of dealing with it.”

But that door has been blown open again. It’s also got her thinking again: yes, she was run out of all three medals by three Chinese women in the 3,000m, finishing fourth, before bouncing back to claim silver over 1,500m, again behind another Chinese women, but in some perverse way that helped turn her into the unbeatable athlete she became in 1994 and 1995 – before imploding under the pressure of it all, including the prospect of a Chinese second coming, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Crazy track sessions

"I remember not long after Stuttgart, in 1993, reading a full-page article in the Daily Telegraph, by a journalist who had gone to China specially to talk with Ma Junren. So you read about the mileage they're doing, some of the crazy track sessions, and you start to wonder are you doing enough at all. And I did up the training very, very hard at the end of 1993, for sure. I actually got injured but managed to get back okay, and I did come out in 1994, and I was flying.

“So that’s another question. Maybe if the Chinese didn’t run those times in 1993, weren’t driving me like that, I wouldn’t have come out and run as fast as I did in 1994.

“And also in 1994, after being sort of knee-jerked into training as hard as I possibly could, running unbelievable times, I would have had the world record for the 3,000m, and it would have stood for the next eight years.”

Still, it did all go horribly wrong in 1996, in Atlanta, when O’Sullivan dropped out of the 5,000m, while one of those same Chinese women, Wang Junxia, won the gold medal: “Thinking about it, today, I think Wang was probably clean when she won the Olympics in 1996, in Atlanta. If you read what’s being said, that they weren’t happy about it, didn’t want to take the drugs.

“And in 1996 Wang just ran normal. It’s was nothing extraordinary. Whereas in 1993 they were on another planet of running, something we’d never seen before, and just couldn’t get our heads around. But in 1996 she was around on her own, without any of Ma’s Army.”

More recently O’Sullivan came face-to-face with Wang, and has also crossed paths several times with Liu Dong, who beat her to the gold medal over the 1,500m in Stuttgart (then promptly disappeared completely).

“Yeah, I’ve met Liu Dong a few times, as recently as last summer’s World Championships in Beijing. She’s with this Spanish guy, who must be 30 or 40 years older than her, and he’s on the IAAF Cross Country Commission, and she travels around with him, goes to lots of different events. I was dying to say something to her [about Stuttgart], but I just couldn’t find the words.”

O’Sullivan also met Wang at the 2012 IAAF Centenary Gala in Barcelona, where the Chinese woman (who still holds the 10,000m and 3,000m world records) was inducted into the inaugural hall of fame.

“I just couldn’t get my head around the fact Wang was being inducted. I couldn’t accept it. It wasn’t right. Because everybody sitting in that big room doubted those records were real, and yet they were giving credit to them.”

Something else didn’t sit right with O’Sullivan at last summer’s World Championships in Beijing: she’d been nominated by Athletics Ireland for a place on the IAAF council, and while originally her heart was in it, she was actually relieved when missing on the final voting.

"It wasn't long after the German ARD documentary, on the allegations of Russian doping, and you're thinking, 'surely all these people must know there is something going on here', stuff they don't agree with it. But they say nothing.

“But then the IAAF treat these people very well . . . If you’re going to speak out about that then suddenly you’re not going to be invited along anymore.

“That’s how a lot of people operated, but the whole thing is unravelling now, falling apart, and for Seb Coe, if he is going to survive, he’ll need to be very open, and accepting. It’s not going to be easy, because the more you go back and dig up, the more things you find, the more questions are asked.

“So where do you stop? You can pass down titles to athletes and then wonder if they’re on the clean page or not. Maybe they do need to start over, BC and AC, ‘Before Coe’ and ‘After Coe’, something like that.”