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Essendon players should not be issued with infraction notices. It is as simple as that!
The naming of 14 past and present Bombers players last week by the Herald Sun brought the whole supplements saga back to the forefront of public consciousness.
Although the debate was largely focused on the ethics of publishing the players’ identities, it was irrelevant to the issue at hand. What is relevant is that the investigation into the whole sordid ordeal is yet to be wrapped up and made public.
The players still face an uncertain fate. Whether we know their names or not doesn’t change that fact.
But it would be a travesty of justice if any one of those players were rubbed out for what was essentially a breach of trust.
Yes, I know that the athlete is responsible for what goes into his or her body and even the most robust of excuses is seldom considered by the anti doping authorities. But on this occasion a couple of simple facts need to be looked at.
At the beginning of each year the AFL visits every club and runs a seminar for the players. Among the topics discussed is the administration of ‘substances’. The players are instructed to run anything past the club doctor that they are unsure of.
Pretty simple stuff. But what happens when your club doctor signs off on the substance involved? Where to then for the unfortunate player who is told to place his trust in the medical fraternity?
As we learnt during Jobe Watson’s now infamous interview on Fox Footy’s ‘On The Couch’ program, Essendon’s doctor, Bruce Reid, had signed off on the AOD drug that Watson believed he had taken.
And while rumour abounds that the doctor was ridden over roughshod by a pack of the club’s ‘alpha’ males, it must be remembered that Dr. Reid was the only member of this whole mess who actually had the balls to follow through on his threat of legal action against the AFL.
The league was so spooked by his refusal to back down that it decided in its infinite wisdom to drop all of its accusations against him. He is no easybeat!
So now we have the unique situation of the players being caught in the middle, which is where this particular case veers away from the situation that professional cycling has faced in the past.
For the most part in the cycling world, the individual riders knew exactly what they were taking and knew unequivocally that what they were doing was wrong. In fact many riders, Australia’s own Stuart O’Grady included, would go and source their drug of choice personally.
Of course teams had doping programs as well, with doctors and managers intimately involved, but there was no wool being pulled over the cyclists’ eyes.
They knew exactly what was going on and it led to an omertà: a fiercely protected code of silence at the top level of the sport that was broken only at an individual’s peril. I have little to no sympathy for them.
The only mistake the Essendon players made was to follow the directions of their controlling body and accept the word of their club doctor. They shouldn’t be made to pay for someone else’s negligence, especially when those responsible for their welfare have escaped largely unscathed.
Stephen Dank, perhaps the instigator of the whole affair, hasn’t even been spoken to by ASADA. Dean Robinson, aka ‘The Weapon’, is free to do as he chooses.
Yes, he lost his job at Essendon, but he wasn’t sacked. He was stood down on full pay when the story first broke and then resigned before his ‘tell-all’ interview with Channel Seven.
The ill-conceived interview earnt Robinson a tidy sum, but all it really showed was that the besieged fitness manager didn’t know the meaning of the phrase ‘black ops’.
And we have already spoken of the doctor.
We could go on and debate the role played by head coach James Hird and the severity (or lack there of) of his punishment, but we’d be going over old ground.
There is still some doubt over whether or not the substances administered to the Essendon players were or are legal. If they have crossed the doping line, then the situation as a whole needs to be looked at when deciding on punishment.
While the doping authorities would like to see everything in black and white, the fact remains that there is a lot of grey in this case and it must be adjudicated accordingly.
Unfortunately for the Essendon players, they are the ones that stand to lose the most. The whole saga has been extremely divisive with opinion swinging wildly from one extreme to the other.
One universal point of view, though, is that this must never be allowed to happen again. Steps must be taken by everyone associated with the sport to ensure we don’t revisit this scenario two, five, 10 or 20 years down the track.
Otherwise we have learnt nothing.
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