It also means the players have no fear if the forms are released to the enquirer and if ever made public - My guess is Bruce is looking at two things - The writing where it states disclosing substances in the previous seven days is optional and more importantly trying to match his records to see what players were treated by Dank within seven days of a drug test.
Straight out of the 2010 code- http://www.afl.com.au/staticfile/AFL%20Tenant/AFL/Files/Schedule%206%20-%20National%20Anti-Doping%20Code.pdf
2013 is identical.
7.4. The Player must promptly advise his Club Medical
Officer in writing of all substances and medications he subsequently takes or uses
during the AFL Competition in that year. Each Club Medical Officer must maintain
and keep a written record in respect of each Player of all substances and
medications so advised to him. Such records will be the property of the Club.
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That clause isn’t relevant to our players for this specific supplements program. It is relevant where the player takes something outside the club without the knowledge of the club’s medical officer (eg their personal Dr prescribes something) and then needs to report back to Reid.
With our supplements program it was a delegate of the club’s medical officer who was administering the substance. The players did not know that Reid was unclear on the program, in fact Hird had told Dank & Robinson to make sure Reid knew about each supplement. It’s not up to a player to be the go-between to plug the gap because Dank wasn’t talking to Reid and Reid (maybe?) wasn’t asking the right questions of the right people.
However those clauses do show absolutely that the club was negligent for not ensuring its staff kept the required records and we deserved to be fined for this. Then that should have been the end of the saga.
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It does say “The Player” must advise the Medical Officer.
It’s quite clear, however impractical it would be around the clubrooms, that the onus is on the player to shuffle a piece of paper to Reidy when he’s taken a supplement, in or outside the club.
You would have thought that given Dank was an administrators nightmare, some of the managers would have been more mindful of the paperwork that had to be maintained. If done properly as you say, we wouldn’t be here.
Absolutely a world away from Hirdy’s responsibilties too.
And the context is that no (?) club was doing that reporting, and the AFL wasn’t chasing them up to do so. It’s just another stick to beat us with.
As I stated elsewhere in a different context, the AFL don’t give a rat’s tossbag about their rules.
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Does anyone else get the experience where people are talking about Perris and the Winter Olympics and Russia and you’re holding way back, but they still look at you like you’re standing on the edge of a skyscraper rooftop and it’s all like…
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Seems CAS took a leaf out of Gil’s book, leave out the bits that don’t suit the narrative.
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If the documents contain personal information then that personal information shouldn’t be released under the Act. It’s a slam dunk exemption.
The question to be litigated i suspect is whether or not the documents should be released with the personal information redacted, or whether there is enough information already out there about who the players are that even releasing a redacted form would allow those players to be identified.
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The privacy provisions in the ASADA Act are not there to protect ASADA, but ASADA has been using those provisions to deny FOI requests. If the players have no objection to release, ASADA has nowhere else to go.
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That’s absolutely right. But they might.
And that also means ASADA/WADA/CAS had NFI when the players were administered so couldn’t possibly make any determination about whether it fell within a 7 day period before player tested
They just made an assumption to suit their agenda and also put it back on players that they’d all deliberately not filled in the forms as a group cover up when actually doing so was optional
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And I trust that ASADA got the players consent before handing over the forms to WADA, WADA lawyers and CAS. Otherwise, ASADA could be in breach of its own Act.
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Surely that’s not right.
ASADA given they’d be in possession of the forms and prosecuting the players would be entitled to be using them as evidence throughout that process.
And the AFL.
And the media.
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And; if Doctor Reid did keep a record of all the substances the player’s took, does this mean his filing cabinet was lock picked?
Under the Australian Privacy Act, special conditions are imposed on cross- border personal information ( Australian Privacy Principle 8)
As a general rule prior consent is needed ( with the main exemptions for criminal matters) and the agency also needs to be satisfied that the information will be protected in a way corresponding to Australian law.
More recently, the Europeans raised concerns at the the poor privacy provisions applied in Montreal, but , under threat of moving WADA out of Montreal, new laws were adopted.
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It appears WADA are selective in whom they target.
I find the content of the bolded paragraph ‘interesting’. It suggests to me that the Russian athletes and doctor going public embarrassed WADA into limp wristed action. Early Feb article.
Whistleblowers should not go public, says WADA
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea (Reuters) - Whistleblowers in sport should not go public with their information because they would be compromising their potential protection, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Thursday.
UpdatedUpdated 8 February
WADA is at the heart of the biggest doping scandal in years after three Russian whistleblowers went to the media and exposed a massive systematic doping scheme in the country across many sports and involving more than 1,000 athletes.
“We will protect and defend (all whistleblowers’) interests,” WADA President Craig Reedie said on Thursday.
“The problem comes when they themselves go into the public domain. Once that happens it becomes difficult for us to offer good protection. They have now said it publicly.”
Track and field athlete Yulia Stepanova and her husband Vitaly, who went public about doping in Russia back in 2014, has accused WADA of doing nothing after they had tried for years to pass on information to the anti-doping body.
As a result Russia’s track and field team was banned from the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 and Russia was banned from the Pyeongchang winter Olympics starting on Friday, with the athletes competing as neutrals under the Olympic flag.
Russia’s anti-doping agency remains suspended as is the country’s Olympic committee.
The Stepanovs, as well as the former head of the Russian anti-doping lab Grigory Rodchenkov, have fled to the United States for fear of their lives and have gone into hiding after they were branded traitors back home.
All three are now living in undisclosed locations while Russia has said it plans to ask the United States to extradite Rodchenkov.
“It is our philosophy… that whistleblowers should in the great majority of cases remain anonymous,” said WADA Director General Olivier Niggli. “They should not be the face of the investigation, precisely to protect them.”
“Our goal is to protect the identity of the whistleblower to the best of our extent.”
“When a whistleblower goes public then it is the choice of the individual and neither WADA nor any organisation can protect them. We are not equipped for that and only law enforcement has those capabilities.”
(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann; Editing by Amlan Chakraborty)
Source: Reuters
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Aother older article dated 8th Feb, but still a good read.
Interesting that it’s referred to as a SAGA and is it just Russia that is being referenced in the last sentence “the mistakes of the recent past would be confined to the past”.
Why the Russian Olympic doping saga shows the need for a radically different approach to anti-doping in sport
Published 08 February 2018 | Authored by: Jack Anderson
Sport, and particularly the International Olympic Committee (IOC), needs a new approach to doping – one in which1 it frankly and independently interrogates what went wrong and uses that analysis to secure the future.
Mistakes have been made to the extent that doping scandals have dominated the build-up to the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. This is one of the IOC’s marquee events, and the financial viability of the Olympic “movement” depends on it.
The background to the latest scandal is easily explained. But the lessons that need to be learned are not so simply analysed.
BACKGROUND TO THE SAGA
Allegations of a Russian state-sponsored doping conspiracy at the 2014 Sochi Olympics prompted the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to commission an investigation by Canadian sports lawyer Richard McLaren. His report fed into the IOC’s investigation of the Sochi Olympics and its own disciplinary process.
This all led to the IOC’s decision in December 20172 to suspend the Russian Olympic Committee with immediate effect.
Nevertheless, the IOC also decided3 it would still be open to inviting individual Russian athletes to compete in Pyeongchang. But this would be under strict conditions that, if met, would only allow them to participate under a separate designation of “Olympic Athlete from Russia”.
An IOC panel4 appointed to oversee this process initially reviewed applications submitted by 500 Russian athletes – 111 were refused almost immediately. It now looks as if 169 Russian athletes will compete5 in Pyeongchang.
The IOC disciplined a separate tranche of 43 Russian athletes. These athletes had to forfeit the medals they won at Sochi and received life bans from future Olympics. But 39 of them appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and 28 were successful. The court held there was insufficient evidence6 to establish they had committed anti-doping infractions.
Although the court’s mandate was to consider the individual appeals and not to determine whether there was systemic doping at Sochi, its decision was a bad defeat for the IOC.
With 169 Russians permitted to go to Pyeongchang by its own review panel plus the 28 cleared by case, it could be said there are now 197 holes in the key pieces of evidence relied upon by the IOC – the McLaren report and that of Russian whistleblower, Grigory Rodchenkov.
Also, the Russian press has interpreted7 the CAS decision annulling the medal forfeiture as meaning that Russia is reinstated in first place on the unofficial Sochi Olympics medal tally.
Even in the CAS decision to uphold the findings of doping violations against the other 11 Russian athletes, the IOC’s victory was partial. These athletes had their life bans reduced to a ban for the duration of the Pyeongchang Games only.
After the CAS decision, IOC President Thomas Bach8 said reform may be needed to the way the court operates – as did WADA vice-president Linda Hofstad Helleland.9
So, sport is now in a politically charged and totally conflicted situation. Its doping prosecutor (WADA) and the executive that governs sports policy globally (the IOC) have both said an inquiry is needed into the workings of sport’s judiciary. And that inquiry has been prompted by a CAS judgment that applied the anti-doping laws WADA and the IOC wrote, but with whose interpretation they now disagree.
The IOC has refused to invite10 the CAS-cleared athletes to compete in Pyeongchang. It seems to have suggested its rationale is twofold: it still has to get the full reasons for the CAS decision, and it has “additional information” on doping related to those athletes.
But this raises fresh questions about why this supplementary evidence wasn’t supplied to CAS and what exactly are the criteria used – as opposed to the evidence relied upon11 by the IOC in deciding whether to invite the athletes.
Some of those athletes are now (re)challenging the IOC and the carousel of Sochi-related appeals at CAS continues.12 It’s unclear if it will stop before the Pyeongchang Olympics begin on Friday.
WHAT LESSONS CAN BE LEARNED?
The International Paralympic Committee comprehensively banned13 Russia – a move CAS upheld.14 The IOC did not do this; it pursued individuals. There are questions over whether it unnecessarily rushed15 that process (and its lawyers), and whether it had a contingency plan to respond to the worst-case scenario of losing at CAS.
In the long term, questions may well be asked of CAS and whether it has outgrown its current structures to the extent that a permanent, standing court is needed for sport.
More importantly, it must be asked whether the current anti-doping system, which has its origins in responses to the systemic doping of East Germany and others in the 1980s, is designed to pursue and punish instances of institutional or collective or team-mandated doping.
In addition, the system is premised largely on catching individual dopers. Maybe a better way to test the system’s integrity is for entities such as WADA, in conjunction with athlete representative bodies, to continuously and first to ask itself: what if we accuse someone in the wrong? What about a false positive?
If the anti-doping system is scrutinised in this way, it may well prompt uncomfortable questions about the scientific integrity and efficacy of current testing, the resources needed to independently prosecute doping, and the political will to do so.
And yet, if those questions are answered honestly and the necessary checks and balances are put in place, the anti-doping system would be strengthened – and the mistakes of the recent past would be confined to the past.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Anderson
JACK ANDERSON
Jack Anderson is Professor and Director of Sports Law Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely in the area of sports law including The Legality of Boxing (2007),Textbook on Sports Law (2010), Leading Cases in Sports Law (2013) and EU Sports Law (2017). He is a Chartered Arbitrator and, having previously been an arbitrator with the GAA, FAI and Just Sport Ireland, he is currently a mediator/arbitrator for Sports Resolutions UK and the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
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