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The AFL Commission is expected to hand down its findings against Essendon and a number of the club’s coaching staff later today in what has become the latest example of a sport’s governance circus.
Over the weekend many in the media had reported precisely what the findings and penalties would be even before the Commission had officially met.
It added some merit to James Hird’s questioning of the independence of the AFL Commission not to mention the role of governance at the sport’s ruling body.
It’s also worth asking how the AFL can prosecute when the ASADA investigation is still ongoing and no anti-doping charges have yet been made.
The AFL has predetermined the outcome based on an interim report. Governance charges have been levelled at Essendon without all the facts being established and without the opposing arguments being heard. How and why does sport sit outside the usual framework of due process?
The Australian government’s headline grabbing press conference back in February tarred all Australian athletes with allegations of drug taking and match fixing. Yet half a year on, this has been reduced into an in-house ‘family’ dispute between a sport’s governing body and one of its clubs.
With the AFL taking charge of how the story is reported and charting a course to limit damage of its brand, it’s also pertinent to ask: what of ASADA?
As a supposedly independent external party, does ASADA have the same inherent conflict of interest that has been levelled at the AFL Commission? ASADA is not an indifferent bystander; it is effectively the policing arm of sport.
If questions over ASADA’s operations are challenged, should it be permitted to investigate itself? It would be equivalent to the police-force investigating matters of alleged police misconduct.
ASADA’s charter ensures anti-doping education is accessible to athletes and that it must provide stakeholders with clear and accurate information.
According to former ASADA boss, Richard Ings, who coined the phrase ‘the blackest day in Australian sport’ back in February, ASADA must also adhere to strict protocols such as always providing a reference number when contacted about the status of a supplement. But have these protocols been followed, or like Essendon, have issues of governance been found lacking? If this is the case, who’s watching over ASADA to guarantee their relevant protocols are in place and being followed?
If what we’ve been told by sports scientist, Steven Dank, and former AFL tribunal member, Dr Andrew Garnham, is true then reference numbers must exist within ASADA’s database.
Both men previously contacted ASADA regarding the status of AOD-9604. Both were reportedly told it was not banned. The original Australian Crime Commission report that started this whole affair also stated that AOD-9604 was not a banned substance. Testimony from Essendon itself was that an ASADA official told them they would not be charged over AOD-9604.
Six months into a combined ASADA/AFL investigation the release of an ‘interim report’ has done little more than make muddy-waters even dirtier.
There is not enough evidence it seems, at this stage, to charge Essendon with any drug infractions and the status of two of the most controversial supplements, AOD-9604 and Thymosin Beta 4, remain very unclear.
It wasn’t until April that the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) officially announced on its website that AOD-9604 was banned under section S-0 of the prohibited list. ASADA’s website still remains silent on its status.
Separately, WADA has not determined the status of Thymosin Beta 4 while only recently ASADA’s website declared it is a banned substance even, unusually, when applied as a cream (bought, for example, from David Jones) and out-of-competition. Both AOD-9604 and Thymosin still have not been specifically named in the 2013 WADA prohibited list or on its substance search app.
Six month’s ago Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, Jason Clare announced “the work that the ACC has done has found the use of prohibited substances including peptides, hormones and illicit drugs is widespread amongst professional athletes.”
The questions that should have been asked on that day still carry currency six months on:
Which banned substances?
Which athletes?
What evidence?
The then Sports Minister, Kate Lundy, suggested ‘if you want to dope and cheat we will catch you, if you want to fix a match we will catch you’.
Again, we are still waiting to know whether this was ever the situation. And amongst it all the silence from ASADA is deafening.
While we can all see the merit in having political support for promoting sport and having organisations that protect and watch over the integrity of sport, it’s important to ascertain: who is watching over the watchers?
Tracey Holmes has focussed her career in journalism on sport and its wider implications, and has written this article with Dr Ben Koh, is a Sports Doctor and anti-doping expert finishing his doctoral research on the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in elite level sports.
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