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Wayne Bennett and Phil Gould are both vehemently protesting the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority’s report on the possible corruption of our sports through the use of illegal substances.
Their protests come in different forms, Bennett preferring the I-plan-to-make-absolutely-no-sense approach:
“If we’ve got the drug problems we’ve had, well, what’s the agency been doing?”
Wow. Okay, so his beef with how this investigation is being conducted is that if the ASADA actually has a case, they’ve taken too darn long to act, so I guess we should all just throw up our hands and walk away.
Nice try.
Gould, someone I always enjoy listening to on all matters related to the game, objects to the “broad brush” used by the Crime Commission to paint a picture of the issue, evidenced by words such as “maybe,” “suspected” and “potential.”
He worries that:
“At the moment, everyone is guilty and I’m not sure, even if they find pockets of illegality, how you repair the integrity of everyone else who is in fact innocent.”
Let’s start with the easy stuff.
Right now, no one has been accused of anything. To say “everyone is guilty” is a nonsense.
Secondly, investigating corruption in an organisation will inevitably create a generalised cloud of suspicion which may cover every member of that organisation – in the short term.
This is natural, and tends to fade over time. If authorities worried about that, nothing would ever get done.
Concerning the vagueness of words like “possible” and “suspected,” Gould seems to want it both ways.
On the one hand, he doesn’t want people’s reputation and “integrity” to be tarnished. At the same time, he’d obviously prefer the agency to recklessly name names before it’s absolutely certain of who may be complicit.
As a former coach who now works in management, Phil Gould should know how these kinds of investigations work. They take time.
And if he really cares about the integrity of the game, he should be happy that an effort is being made to ensure drug use does not occur in rugby league.
He dismisses “pockets” of illegality as an irrelevance.
Can you give us a number, Phil? Is five players okay to live with? What about 10? Surely he knows how quickly this stuff can spread.
The message should be clear to the public and the ASADA:
Don’t listen to the stakeholders.
Especially those closest to the players: the coaches.
As a baseball fan, I sat through years of heated denial by managers (that sport’s version of coaches) over the suspicions of widespread steroid use by their players.
As it turns out, many players were using, sometimes in plain sight in the locker rooms.
Their statistics were absurdly inflated and it is simply impossible to believe that reasonably intelligent managers, witnessing the explosion of bodies and performances on the field, had no idea their players were doping.
But they did what most coaches/managers do. They stuck up for their players.
Which is why, in matters of corruption in sport, we should always ignore those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
The innocent will move on. The guilty will be exposed – and by that I mean not only those taking but also, even more importantly, those who convince young players to take this junk.
Or maybe we’ll find out that there really wasn’t a problem in our game. Maybe there was never smoke nor fire.
Fine. We made sure of it, laid down a marker for the future and nobody got hurt.
Ultimately, this isn’t about protecting anyone’s integrity. Phil Gould and Wayne Bennett should be more interested in protecting young people’s bodies.
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