As a footy and cycling fan, I’m genuinely sympathetic to how devastating the CAS verdict must be to the Essendon players. However, like many cycling fans, there is a temptation to feel a degree of schadenfreude at the ‘pain’ of doping scandals being distributed around other sports.
Of more value though is comparing the Essendon doping case to those that have plagued pro cycling – a sport synonymous with doping.
And the differences are perhaps fewer than some assume.
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
» Essendon doping saga: What did we learn?
» Devastated Watson speaks after WADA bans
» Essendon need their fans in 2016
» What the Essendon bans could mean for the 2016 AFL season
Pro cycling lies somewhere between a team and individual sport. For the purposes of doping, cyclists can be categorised two ways – those doping to win (as individuals – e.g. Lance Armstrong) and those who do it for team reasons (i.e. domestiques, who ride in support of team leaders, and whose goals may be limited to just holding on to their job).
Cyclists doping to win races such as the Tour de France tend to receive limited sympathy, as self-interest is clearly at the heart of their decision.
But for other cyclists, particularly in the 1990s with the advent of EPO, doping offered performance gains sufficient to make the difference between hanging on and being left behind. Many of those cyclists reluctantly chose to dope, assessing it as a necessary evil to keep their position on the team. They tend to elicit more mixed feelings, and their circumstances bear some similarities to the Essendon players.
David Zaharakis’ decision to refuse the injections has received much attention. But what I noted was his relatively senior and secure status in the team.
Regardless of Zaharakis’ reasons (reportedly needle phobia), he felt confident enough to rebuff his club’s ‘offer’ of supplement injections. During cycling’s EPO era, there were examples of pro cyclists who refused to dope and still kept their team positions. Typically, they were talented riders whose natural strength partly compensated for the penalty they paid by riding clean.
But what of the less talented cyclists? Were they more culpable for electing to dope, even if that choice was influenced by their lesser abilities – qualities independent of their morality and character? This is a common argument put forward in defence of cyclists who doped – “They all did it, they had to.”
A major difference is that the vast majority (though not all) of cyclists knew precisely what substances they were taking and of their prohibited status. The Essendon players were not – to our knowledge – similarly informed.
But that difference is not the crux of the argument against applying the WADA code to team sports. The WADA code is clear that ignorance is no excuse, and that athletes have a duty to ascertain a substance is not banned before allowing it to enter their body. This applies equally to athletes in individual and team sports.
Rather, the key argument against the WADA code applying to teams is the coercive power of professional sports teams over their athletes and culture of athletes submitting to team directions. This is incongruous with the demands of the WADA code – which places ultimate responsibility for anti-doping squarely on the individual athlete.
The comparison between AFL and pro cycling I’ve drawn demonstrates that this dilemma is not unique to Essendon or the AFL. In fact, it’s not even unique to team sports – with many individual athletes having fallen victim to similar coercive powers of their corrupt national sports and Olympic federations.
This is why the WADA anti-doping code is so strict. Penalising expendable, faceless officials who may be the real drivers behind a case of doping poses a limited deterrent.
It’s the athlete whose performance most counts, and it is only by jeopardising the athlete’s place in their sport that anti-doping sanctions can have a genuine effect.
The broader consequences of reversing that principle, as some have called for in the wash-up of the Essendon case? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
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