Cast your minds back to this summer’s Olympics and it is likely memories of sporting excellence will be the first recollections that come to mind. Yet a dark shadow was cast over Rio de Janeiro in the build-up to the Games and the full ramifications of that have still to be spelt out.

“Hurry up, and wait really,” was Gary Anderson’s immediate response when I asked what stage the process had reached into investigating the allegations of Russian state-sponsored doping when I met the Watford-born chief of British Bobsleigh again earlier this month.

That answer is easy to understand because Anderson’s four-man crew is waiting to find out if it will be retrospectively awarded a medal from the 2014 Winter Olympics Games, having come fifth behind two Russians sleds in Sochi.

Bobsleigh is one of the sports implicated in the scandal after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) commissioned a report from Canadian law professor Richard McLaren that found urine samples from Russian competitors were manipulated across a host of winter and summer Olympic sports for a four-year period, including the Sochi Games.

The commission was established to look into claims by the ex-head of the country’s national anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, that he doped dozens of athletes in the build-up to the 2014 Games.

McLaren’s full report is expected shortly and if its publication leads to the two Russian crews being disqualified, Britain should be awarded a medal.

“We’ve obviously followed what’s happened very closely and we know that the McLaren report is due at the end of this month,” the performance director of British Bobsleigh said.

“I’ve been interviewed officially [by McLaren’s investigative team] and I’m happy for that to be said. What was contained in that interview I’m not allowed to say, but put it this way it was nothing that wasn’t already quite well known.”

As well as a retrospective reason for awaiting the outcome, the former Leggatts School pupil also has a significant competition looming increasingly large on the horizon prominent in his mind.

“We have to travel to the World Championships in Russia this coming season and that is a real concern to us,” he explained. “We’re travelling to a country that is non-WADA compliant and that obviously raises lots of questions.

“In terms of the report, we’ll have to wait and see what comes out. I’m confident that WADA, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and our international federation will do whatever is necessary to ensure the result in Sochi is the correct one.”

While the waiting goes on, Anderson is pleased the full extent of the allegations are now in the public domain, although there is a relationship element to it that can easily be overlooked by those not directly involved.

“Whilst it’s uncomfortable, whilst it’s not good reading, I’m pleased that it’s out there,” he said.

“It has much wider ramifications than just bobsleigh, it goes across all sports, and the people I feel sorry for in all of this are probably the Russian athletes.

“We go around the world with Russian athletes and Russian coaches, some of whom are my friends.

“It’s a very uneasy situation at the moment. I’m fairly certain that probably the athletes and the coaches had little choice or indeed did they know the full story.

“What this has taught me is that culturally Russia is very different to the rest of the world. I’m not sure how this is being reported back in Russia but I would have thought the people of Russia may not even see what’s been done wrong here. And that’s a shame.”

Turning to the future, Anderson continued: “If you look at the whole doping aspect in sport with what has happened recently with the therapeutic use exemption stories [in professional cycling] and people going close to the line, not crossing the line or whatever, these are stories that will never go away and they are part and parcel of our everyday lives.

“All I that I know is that in the UK we have a system that is one of the strongest in the world where athletes know what they can do, what they can’t do and the consequences if they choose to go across that line.

“They are tested on a regular basis in the UK; that’s something I would like across the world that all athletes of my sport are tested the same way universally, and if we get to that point I would be happy.”