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The 34 past-and-present Essendon players who were earlier this year given bans by the Court for Arbitration of Sport (CAS) have officially lost their appeal of the decision to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.
Essendon’s appeal attempted to argue that, had the CAS decision been made under Australian law, they should not have been found guilty.
However the Swiss Federal Tribunal found that the CAS decision was made under Swiss law, and therefore the guilty decision and all of its outcomes remain standing.
It makes little difference now, as the season is over and the players will all be free to take part again from 2017 onwards, but a successful appeal would have been a significant moral victory for those banned.
The major tangible outcome of the decision however, will be the doubt it casts over the future of Jobe Watson’s 2012 Brownlow Medal, with the AFL having put the award under review.
Sam Mitchell of Hawthorn and Trent Cotchin of Richmond, who finished tied in second place that year, are in line to inherit the award should Watson be stripped of it.
I hate to say it because I am personally a massive fan of Jobe Watson and think he has handled himself very well through an extremely difficult time, but I don’t think the AFL has any choice left but to take the Brownlow back.
For the league to leave his name on the ledger of winners in a year where he was eventually found guilty of peptide use, and that guilty verdict was upheld by the highest authority available, would be a farcical decision.
Some may feel that the guilty verdict was an unfair one, and that a player shouldn’t be punished for something that, by many but not all reports, they were unaware was illegal. I don’t necesarilly disagree with that.
However those are the laws that the AFL signed up to when they agreed to work under the WADA code – that a player is individually responsible for what goes into their body, and will be held accountable for it.
It’s a sad end to what has been a sad tale. But to avoid our code becoming a laughing stock, despite the heartbreak it will bring, stripping Watson of the Brownlow appears the right thing to do.