Track star Mcconnell still feeling pain of those medals denied by drug cheats

● Too late to put right years of frustration

Dame Jessica Ennis-hill won’t run a metre, put a shot or throw a javelin but is still likely to receive one of the biggest ovations of the week at next month’s IAAF World Championships in London when she belatedly receives the 2011 gold denied to her by a Russian drugs cheat.

It will be one of several such medal ceremonies held at the same Olympic Stadium that Ennis-hill lit up in 2012, a year after being denied in Daegu, South Korea, by the now convicted blood doper Tatyana Chernova.

Scotland’s most decorated athlete of the past decade-anda-half, Lee Mcconnell, has yet to receive a similar backdated acknowledgement, despite a few compelling cases, but is adamant that, fleetingly nice as it would be, it would never make up for the frustration of missed glory moments.

Excitement is building ahead of next month’s world championships but athletics remains a sport traumatised by the taint of cheating, with Russia still banned following exposure of the shocking, systematic state-sponsored extent of its doping programme.

Over her fine career, Mcconnell won three individual medals in 400m and 400m hurdles at Commonwealth Games and European Championships, plus an additional relay bronze at the latter and two world championship bronzes as part of the GB quartet in 2005 and 2007.

A prized Olympic gong is the obvious gap in that still impressive roll of honour.

Mcconnell ran alongside Donna Fraser, Catherine Murphy, and Christine Ohuruogu and finished fourth in the 4x400m relay at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. An American athlete, Crystal Cox, was