- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
After 1071 days, the biggest scandal in the history of Australian sport reached its flashpoint, with the banning of 34 past and present Essendon players for their role in the club’s ill fated 2012 supplements program.
News services, television shows, talkback radio, column inches and online forums have all been dominated by the Essendon saga for the past three years. But what exactly have we learnt from this regrettable but captivating chapter in the history of our game?
We learnt that Essendon is a club that has been too insular for too long and needs to adapt to the changing landscape that is the modern world of professional sport.
James Hird was appointed senior coach of Essendon at the end of the 2010 season. He was three years out of the game with no coaching experience at any level to his name, appointed based on nothing but his standing as a legend and icon of Essendon.
Hird’s inexperience in managing a football team and eagerness to make a quick impression goes at least some way to explaining the calamitous mistake that was embarking on the 2012 supplements program.
More Essendon:
» The AFL must not abandon the WADA Code
» Lindsay Tanner looms as Essendon’s saviour
» Bonfire of the certainties: Dissecting CAS’s Essendon decision
» Devastated Watson speaks after WADA bans
» Essendon need their fans in 2016
» What the Essendon bans could mean for the 2016 AFL season
We learnt that players need to take responsibility for anything and everything that enters their bodies.
Make no mistake, most if not all other playing groups would have responded in a similar way to the supplements program introduced to Essendon by Stephen Dank in 2012 – with trust and complicity. The illusion that football clubs or individuals employed within football clubs are to be trusted with regards to supplements and injections has been shattered.
The take home message for footballers is simple – do your own research.
We learnt that ASADA was hopelessly equipped to deal with an investigation and prosecution of this magnitude.
Back in 2013, ASADA lacked the coercive powers to force Essendon players to divulge details to their investigators about the supplements progam. Only the so-called ‘joint inquiry’ with the AFL enabled them to gather the information they required, leading to a Federal Court challenge by Essendon and James Hird into the legality of the investigation.
Not withstanding the delay caused by the legal action, ASADA’s overall lack of resources meant that it wasn’t until November 2014 that infraction notices were issued to players, despite Essendon having self-reported way back in February 2013. Justice delayed is justice denied.
We learnt that even the reach of the all-conquering AFL has its limits.
The AFL rules the Australian sporting landscape. It is able to influence the government, the media, business and the community at large to do its bidding and buy into its narrative. ASADA’s case was prosecuted before an AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal which, while independent in theory, must surely have felt at least some pressure to deliver a judgement and an outcome acceptable to the league itself.
However, once WADA appealed this decision to the Court of Abritration for sport, the saga escaped into a vortex of international doping regulation well beyond even the AFL’s influence. In the end, the final judgement was damning.
Finally, we learnt that cheaters never prosper.
Just about nobody at Essendon will tell the same story about what went on in 2012. One thing is for certain however, and that is the club set out to gain a competitive advantage over their rivals and it blew up in their faces in spectacular fashion.
One Essendon player told ASADA that Dank justified the program to his playing group by using the analogy of going right up to the edge of a cliff but not over it. Today, the Essendon Football Club has not fallen off a cliff, it has fallen off a mountain.
Clean sport involving hard work and the development of elite talent has won the day over a dubious supplements program where the search for a competitive advantage went just that little bit too far.
Who’s in your ultimate team? Pick the best team and compete with other fans for daily prizes on Draftstars. For the best odds on the game try out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Think. Is this a bet you really want to place? Set a deposit limit.