The Roar
The Roar

AFL
Advertisement

WADA’dya think was going to happen? It's time to frame the Essendon saga properly

13th May, 2015
Advertisement
Expert
13th May, 2015
86
3417 Reads

The regulatory nightmare that has plagued the Essendon Football Club’s drug saga has reared its ugly head again.

James Hird said he’s surprised. And he said the whole of Melbourne would be surprised. But are we and should we be?

One of the biggest problems the football world has had in understanding the Bombers’ plight is the way in which the issue has been framed.

Several regulatory schemes, most of which are unrelated, have all had a stake in the case: ASADA, Essendon, the AFL and the AFL Players Association to name a few. Each time a party became involved, the landscape and complexity of the issue morphed into something new.

Take Worksafe, for example.

When Worksafe finally came to the party and looked at the incident from a workplace safety point of view, the issue went from being one framed around drug cheats to an issue of occupational health and safety.

The rhetoric went along these lines: imagine going to work, doing something your boss – whom you trust – tells you to do, then finding out months later that you are being investigated by authorities for that very thing your boss told you to do.

Of course, injecting substances without question would happen at very few workplaces, but the analogy is definitely there to be made.

Advertisement

Today we’re no more clearer on what the 34 Essendon players were injected with – legal or not – and whether or not these injections will have ramifications for the players’ future health. After ASADA unceremoniously failed to gather enough compelling evidence to charge the Essendon players with taking a banned substance, it seemed inevitable that we may never know.

But the closing of the ASADA investigation did not rule out the possibility of another trial under the auspices of a bigger, more powerful body: WADA.

And with the introduction of WADA to the fray, the framing of the issue has once again changed. It’s now a David and Goliath battle as a team from Australia takes on a body that was founded in Lausanne, Switzerland, but now officially resides in Montreal, Canada.

Australia versus the world. No, Essendon versus the world. No, it’s got to be Hird versus the world.

It’s something the Essendon players shouldn’t have to endure, especially in the wake of the ASADA verdict and the weight of over two years of speculation being lifted off their shoulders just over a month ago. But the strict liability rules enforced with doping dictate that it’s the players who are ultimately responsible for what they may or may not have had injected into their bodies.

For those who champion clean sport, this is a good day. For those who despair at the thought of young boys’ lives and careers being tarnished, perhaps destroyed, then this is far from a good day. And for those wanting to reconcile the two, this is a day that may ultimately never come to fruition.

We want our athletes and our sporting codes to be clean, but do we want this at the expense of 34 players who are still unsure of what was injected into their persons?

Advertisement

As WADA lodges its independent right to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), these are the issues that will again be raised. But for the first time since the scandal broke in early 2013, the AFL will be totally powerless.

What’s more, this will be a truly independent trial.

There will be no cries of any body acting ultra vires, or beyond the scope of their power, as Essendon claimed the AFL had done when conducting a joint investigation with ASADA. Emotion will be stripped from the trial, which may be presided over by authorities that have never watched, let alone heard of AFL.

Because of this, it’s imperative this new chapter of the doping saga is framed properly so that revisionist history is not played out. Both Hird and captain Jobe Watson have said, in the wake of WADA’s appeal to the CAS, they draw hope and strength from their not guilty verdicts handed down by ASADA.

But the fact of the matter is that the 34 players charged with doping were never exonerated with a ‘not guilty’ verdict. The tribunal didn’t even consider the question because of the lack of evidence tabled at the trial.

And if this same lack of evidence wasn’t enough to deter WADA, Essendon should be worried because if WADA are choosing to pursue the Essendon players then they must have a reasonable belief that there is a case to answer for.

close