Great Britain's 1997 World Championship 4x400 metres relay team are to receive the gold medal after finishing second behind a quartet featuring US dope cheat Antonio Pettigrew, it was confirmed Thursday. Pettigrew ran the anchor leg for the United States team that won gold in Athens 13 years ago but subsequently admitted to taking performance-enhancing drugs. As well as Britain receiving gold, Jamaica will receive the silver medals and Poland the bronze. A spokesman for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), athletics' world governing body, told selfnews: 'The decision to strip Pettigrew of his medals was approved by the IAAF council in late November 2008 and the new medals were sent to the relevant IAAF member federations (Great Britain, Jamaica and Poland) in 2009.' In a close race, the American 4x400m team beat the British quartet by just 0.18 seconds in the Athens final. 'I have missed out on 13 years of telling people I am a world champion,' Jamie Baulch, a member of the British team that also featured Iwan Thomas, Roger Black and Mark Richardson, told the BBC on Thursday. 'There is a little bit of bitterness that we were robbed of the gold. It is a bit of a disgrace as I missed an opportunity to celebrate in front of 100,000 people as the sport was at its peak, it was the golden days of athletics. 'When you think of it and to put it into perspective, we ran four seconds faster than the current GB team ran last year - so that was how fast we were. 'It is a bit sad that it has happened the way it has but that's the way the cards have been dealt to me - so you may see us in a medal ceremony in the next amount of months,' he added. Last year Pettigrew, together with his team-mates, was stripped of the gold medal the United States won for the 4x400m relay at the 2000 Sydney Olympics because of his doping offences. 