One of Australia’s highest-profile sports medicos says athletes who take illegal substances – even unwittingly – have no one else to blame if they get caught out.
Dr Peter Larkins, a Sports Medicine Australia spokesman and Melbourne media personality, says it’s time for professional athletes to both accept accountability and also stand up and say no to unrecognised drugs.
He says it’s no excuse, no matter how much pressure they feel under to succeed, for naive professional athletes to blame clubs for making them take non-approved substances.
“I think there’s a real problem of players being manipulated by more senior authorities,” Dr Larkins told AAP before the NRL announced the suspension of Cronulla coach Shane Flanagan following ASADA’s investigation into the Sharks’ 2011 supplements program.
“I used the word ‘Hird’ mentality and I didn’t mean it in a pun sense at Essendon – but it is a herd mentality where young players and groups follow what they think is genuine advice by their more senior people at the club.”
Dr Larkins says the plight of the Essendon AFL and Cronulla NRL clubs highlights the dangers of sporting organisations having their resident doctors marginalised by sports scientists and other non-medical personnel.
But he says the perils of such practices aren’t limited to the AFL and NRL.
“That’s why we need medical people to have some logic and some absolute evidence to go down the path of some of these things and it’s the ultimate responsibility of the doctor to make sure he’s on top of the issue,” he said.
“But I guess the education program about drug use in Australia, which I’ve been part of for a couple of decades, is that the athlete has to clarify if he has any concerns or any hesitations.
“If he is thinking ‘well, that doesn’t sound right, I don’t think I should be doing this’, he has to go and make sure that he is not going to get into trouble.
“Really, at the end of the day, the responsibility lies with the athlete … if they have any concern about having injections done and they don’t want to do it, they do not have to comply.
“The club cannot force them to do something that they have concerns about.”
ASADA has yet to complete its probe in the Sharks so the players under scrutiny are not in the clear yet.
“All these products that you read about – the CJC-1295 and the AOD and the Thymosin beta-4 – all of which have been documented as being bought, whether (or not) they’ve been administered, but they’ve been bought by rugby league clubs,” Dr Larkins said.
“They probably didn’t go to the coaches. They probably went to the playing group, let’s be honest.
“So if ASADA does its job thoroughly, there will be adverse findings against players, which will mean it will be resolved because there will be some suspensions, I suspect.”
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