Derval O’Rourke will have to wait a while longer before finally receiving her bronze medal from the 2013 European Indoor Championships, after she revealed yesterday that legal issues have added a further disruption to the process.

The Irish athlete had originally finished fourth in the 60m hurdles decider, but a two-year ban handed out to Turkish race winner Nevin Yanit led to O’Rourke being upgraded to a podium position.

Speaking at the launch of the Coca-Cola Thank You Fund 2014 in the Iveagh Gardens yesterday, O’Rourke admits she is surprised the medal isn’t in her possession yet, but is confident it will finally be sorted out in the not-too-distant future.

“Officially, I have it, but I don’t officially have it,” says O’Rourke cryptically. “There’s a letter saying I have it, but until the legal process is done, I won’t get it. I’ll get it, it’ll just be so late. I actually thought I’d have it by now because I got a phone call a few months ago about it,” the 32-year-old Cork star said.

“I think with a lot of the drugs stuff now — there was nothing about Tyson Gay for almost a year — hopefully when it happens it will all get sorted quickly. I’ve been told it’s just a matter of time.”

The record books state she achieved a third-place finish in the event, but having recently moved into a new home, O’Rourke knows how different it will feel when she physically has the medal in her grasp.

“Sports Council have a letter saying just call it third. It’s third, but I don’t physically have it. I don’t even know what it looks like.

“I was actually moving house recently and I have all my medals [in one place] and I was going ‘it’s so frustrating it’s only four — it should be five’. It feels like there’s one missing.”

While O’Rourke is still undecided about extending her athletics career into 2015 and onwards, she currently has her sights on the big outdoor track event of the year, the European Championships in Zurich. With the August finals coming roughly 12 months on from her Achilles surgery, the UCD graduate will not be short on motivation.

“That was always my aim. The fact that it was 12 months later was always something that kept me very motivated. Because it was quite a hard process to be motivated from. That’s always been [it] exactly, that it was 12 months. That has been the thing that has gotten me out most days, and made me move my bum a bit and try and run!

“I always had this idealistic plan that I’d start my season at the end of May, but I think I’ll just postpone that for a while and take stock, see what I can do over hurdles, what load I can tolerate. Because my leg has to not react if I do back-to-back races, Zurich is three races in a row, so hopefully the end of June [I’ll be back in action]. I quite like the idea of Zurich. I love European championships.”