It did not take long for my social media accounts to begin logging unusual activity as people started reacting to insidethegames’ exclusive story, most of them negatively. "You will be positive when you discover some new substances in your tea," someone messaged me.

That was a reference to former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko poisoned in London 16 years ago with polonium, allegedly in an operation ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, after exposing corruption in his home country.

A message to my email account sent a chilling warning. "We catch journalists and kill them," it read.

Someone helpfully messaged me to say, "99% of the time death threats are exaggerated", leading me to reply that it was the "one per cent that worried me".

It led me to reflect on previous times I had written stories that had upset people so much they felt compelled to threaten me with physical harm. One of the things that struck me was how the delivery of the threats has changed with the evolution of technology.

I had only been in my first journalism job, on a local newspaper, a few weeks when a package landed on my desk. It had been compiled using a series of letters cut out of other newspapers and said simply, "If you want to stay alive, quit." Frightening though it was, for a 21-year-old straight out of university, it turned out everyone who started at the newspaper got one of these and they were seen as something of a rite of passage. I must admit I had grudging admiration for my anonymous correspondent who had clearly gone to so much trouble to try to intimidate me. I should have guessed that it was not that serious because they had sent it using a second-class stamp. 

More worryingly, was when a leading local footballer, whose lack of goals I had criticised, turned up at our offices one day and demanded that I "step outside and get what was coming to me." A tense 20-minutes standoff ensued before a couple of his mates showed up and they headed off down the pub - much to my relief. 

A few years later, while working for The Guardian, one day my telephone at home started ringing day and night and a distorted voice would wish me and my family all sorts of unimaginable suffering.

I had a fairly good idea of who it was and when it became clear that they were not going to stop, out of my respect to my family, I went to the police. You could imagine their surprise when they asked them if I suspected anyone, and I gave them the name of a world-renowned Olympic medal-winning athlete.

After much persuading, they agreed to check it out. A few days later, the police showed up at my door to confirm they had traced the calls and issued a warning to the person making them. The calls stopped that day.

Before the Valieva story, the most sinister intimidation I had suffered was in 2004, six months before the start of the Olympics in Athens, when I exclusively broke the story in The Observer that sprinters Kostas Kederis and Ekaterina Thanou, among the favourites for gold medals in their home Games, and their coach Christos Tzekos, were implicated in a doping scandal originating in California.

An American laboratory was supplying drugs to many high-profile athletes, including British sprinter Dwain Chambers, who I had already exposed.

Tzekos responded by telling the American news agency Associated Press that he was "going to sue The Observer for £80 million (£60 million/€70 million) for serious defamation". By noon of the day after publication, a Greek website had published my mobile telephone number and I received so many abusive calls and texts from Greeks demanding to know why I was, in the words of one, writing "such shit" about their athletes, that I had to turn the phone off. As soon as I switched it back on, my message box was full, there was no room for any more texts and the calls would resume. Eventually, I had to change the number.

An interview on Greek radio began with the question: "Why have you been defaming our gloriously great Olympic champion [Kederis]?" The Greek Sports Minister, Yiannis Lianis, said: "I consider the accusations baseless because our distinguished athletes continue to go through checks and have never tested positive." A Greek restaurant owner in England rang me and my family to threaten to beat me up.

On the eve of Athens 2004, Kederis and Thanou pulled out of the Olympics, having evaded official drug-testers and faked a motorcycle accident as the central characters in a scandal that overshadowed the start of the Games. The coach who told the world he was suing The Observer, but never followed up, was banned and disappeared into oblivion.

Journalists these days are often subjected to racist or sexist slurs, vile insults and threats of rape, dismemberment or other violence from online readers. Plenty of my colleagues, particularly female reporters, have received way worse abuse than I ever have.

Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote last year about receiving online abuse and said, "Unless you've been there, it's hard to comprehend how deeply destabilising it is, how it can make you think twice about your next story, or even whether being a journalist is worth it."

Modern technology has made it easy for journalists to find themselves at the centre of a storm on social media, particularly Twitter, where people can hide behind anonymous profiles.

But just as I refused to be bullied all those years ago when the footballer turned up to the offices of my local newspaper offering to take me outside, I will not be intimidated to stop writing important stories by trolls on social media.