Andrew Steele both 'happy and melancholy' about Beijing bronze

Steele was part of the 4x400m quartet that finished fourth at the 2008 Games, but they were belatedly promoted on Tuesday when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced Russia would be disqualified and stripped of third place after Denis Alekseyev failed a retrospective drugs test.

[RELATED: GB’s Goldie Sayers, 4x400m relay team set for 2008 Olympic bronze medals]

The 31-year-old, who was alerted to the news while clothes shopping in New York, told Eurosport: "I’m really happy but also somewhat melancholy about the reality of it.

"For most sports people, you spend your life in a great sea of dissatisfaction punctuated occasionally with moments of satisfaction. For me, the closest I came to one of those punctuations was in Beijing and I never got to experience it.

"After 12 hard years of trying my absolute best, and ruining a lot of other aspects of my life in order to be really good at the 400m, I never really felt that satisfaction. That was the closest I got."

The GB foursome of Steele, Martyn Rooney, Robert Tobin and Michael Bingham must now wait for the original medals to be handed back by the Russians.

GB javelin thrower Goldie Sayers was also upgraded into bronze after Russian silver medallist Maria Abakumova failed a retrospective test.

While the medals will probably trickle through to the aggrieved athletes – although quite how the IOC goes about tracking them down will be an interesting side story – it is impossible to replace the missed opportunities that being an Olympic medallist can create.

Some have called for medal ceremonies to be held at either the 2017 World Championships in London or the Tokyo 2020 Games to partially make amends.

"I couldn’t carry on a positive mind-set: 'I’ve got an Olympic medal, let’s focus on London 2012' – and I really do believe if I had got that medal at the time it would have changed my fortunes somewhat. Success is built on a series of small trajectory changes, positive or negative, and that would been an important positive," Steele added.

"I think an appropriate forum [for a new medal ceremony] would be London 2017, just to give us the sense of standing on a podium in front of a crowd

"Shotputter Adam Nelson was given his gold medal [from Athens 2004] in a Burger King food court, so hopefully there’ll be more ceremony than that."