THIS should be a time of excitement for Sunderland athlete Aly Dixon. She is on the verge of selection for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio pending UK Athletics’ decision later this year, and has finished a solid comeback season following the disappointment of retiring from the 2014 Commonwealth Games marathon with injury, finishing fourth in September’s Great North Run.

However, the sport she lives and breathes is going through its darkest time amid the allegations of state-sponsored doping on a breathtaking level in Russia following an investigation by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Sanctions have followed from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) but when the allegations were made, a week ago on Wednesday, Dixon made her feelings clear on Twitter.

The diminutive 37-year-old said: “Hate liars. Hate cheats. Hate dopers. Hate that my beautiful sport is being dragged through the mud. Time to act and act big.”

Born into distance running - her father is a marathon runner also - Dixon is resolutely anti-doping. Her career so far has been fuelled only by hard work rather than chemicals, and she feels the recent allegations have touched a nerve with those who are determined to compete the right way.

“It is quite upsetting but you can’t let it get to us and we can’t let it put us off what we’re doing as clean athletes,” said Dixon, who is preparing for her winter season which will include cross-country action while she awaits the decision on whether she will need to compete in the London Marathon to secure her Rio 2016 place.

“It’s always disappointing to think that you are competing against cheats, but at the minute it’s also disappointing to see athletics being dragged through the mud. In a way it needs to be, so that we can clean it up.”

A keen scholar of her sport, Dixon had watched the December documentary on the Russian allegations made by German broadcasters MDR, but did not expect the results of the subsequent WADA investigation to be so dramatic.

“In a way you were hoping that the German documentary was a bit exaggerated and a bit sensationalised,” said Dixon. “But to actually sit and listen to the findings of the report that there is widespread doping and more shockingly it is systematic doping in that the government is involved, then you have the alleged corruption with the IAAF – it was quite upsetting to hear the scale of it and it’s a lot worse than I first thought it was.”

Dixon has built up a friendship with Paula Radcliffe through her participation in training camps in Kenya and Font Romeu, and proved to be a trusted confidante earlier this year when Radcliffe was under suspicion for doping having refused to disclose her testing history when other athletes had done so.

Just as cyclist Chris Froome has faced allegations of doping throughout his career, Dixon feels the tide is turning towards athletes like Radcliffe, where any success is followed by suspicion.

She said: “It does make you slightly disheartened because I’m putting in all of this work, I’m slogging my guts out, I’m missing out on all sorts of life events to try and be the best I can be, but if there are all of these people who are cheating, I’m never going to be the best out there. I’m realistic, I know I’m not going to be the best anyway, but even just looking at some of the girls around my standard, some of them could be doping.

“To me, when you hear stories of age groupers or local guys that are taking all sorts of stuff, that’s the more saddening thing because it’s filtered down to that level. When you have a good performance, the finger starts being pointed.

“It’s that mentality that is coming into the sport. People can’t appreciate a good performance without having suspicion.

“That’s the attitude that makes you think ‘why am I bothering’ when people say ‘how can you do that clean’. I know that I have done it clean. Trust me. It’s harder for an athlete to prove that they are clean.

“It’s easier to prove they are dirty because they fail tests, but it’s hard to prove they are clean. Even if you pass a test people still say “you’re micro-dosing, you’re doing this, you’re doing that” but it’s hard to prove that you are 100% honest.

“Paula said to me “how can I prove that I’ve done nothing” – you can’t. It’s hard. You can put all your data out there but someone will come back and say it’s not possible.

“When you look at the likes of Paula and Usain Bolt, and I’ve said this to her – they are freaks. They are not normal. Why would people expect their blood results to be normal?”

In less than a year’s time, there is a chance that Dixon could be lining up in Rio to contest the marathon. The culmination of a dream - but if her place was to be taken by someone who was later found to be doping, however unlikely that may be, she feels that would be the ultimate betrayal.

“I’m not naïve enough to think that it’s only Russia,” said Dixon, who finds out later this year whether the 2.29.30 11th-place finish at the Berlin Marathon in September will be good enough for Team GB selection. “I’m not naïve to think that Brits don’t dope, I know there are one or two that do. I do honestly believe that we don’t have such a big culture of it.

“That would make me more upset than angry if I was ever denied a place because of that.

“Because they’d have to be a Brit, and because I know all the girls I’m competing with, it would be someone you trusted to be clean and then turned out not to be. That would make me upset and angry.

“It’s hard to think that it happens. Everyone that I compete against are friends. We go on training camps together, but put us on the start line and we’re dead enemies. Outside of that we are friends, we do get on. If someone that you know and get on with has betrayed your trust, they go away and dope to get that edge, that’s a horrible thought and not one I’d like to think about.

“I do trust my competitors, and yeah I might be sounding a bit hypocritical to say the Brit girls don’t dope – I trust them not to. It would be heartbreaking. Hand on heart I could never see that happening.”

While Dixon is adamant that those found guilty of any wrongdoing are punished appropriately, she does have a certain amount of sympathy with the young Russian athletes who, such is the extent of the state-sponsored doping system, willingly go along with their elders.

Dixon sees parallels in the current situation to the East Germany doping scandal, where, over a 30-year spell from the 1960s until the Communist state’s abolition, athletes were systematically supplied with steroids and testosterone to boost their performance.

“It was never questioned because the athletes trusted those that were in charge,” explained Dixon. “It was a case of if they wanted to do this sport you had to do it. They just went along with it and didn’t really know it was wrong.

“Because some of these athletes are kept so hidden from the world, it’s possibly easier to brainwash them and say that everybody is doing it.

“Then you take a viewpoint like Lance Armstrong. You say it’s cheating, he saw it as putting him on a level playing field. But why not bring the playing field down to your level rather than rising up to theirs?”

Dixon knows there is a way back for a sport that she has been involved in all her life, but that tougher times are to come. Her ideas for reform include standardising drugs testing across the board, increasing the level of funding to WADA and making the national drug agencies independent of both country and sport to avoid a conflict of interest.

“It’s going to be a real hard job. It’s not something that’s going to be sorted in six months, 12 months,” said Dixon. “You’re looking at a long-term process, you need to get all the national drugs agencies on the same level.

“We need to bring it down to the ground and then build it back up. Get everybody out, get independent bodies in there, and get the trust back. That’s the big thing right now, a lot of athletes are losing the trust in anti-doping organisations and the IAAF.

“While it’s disappointing that it’s been going on, we can hopefully now change the future.”