Graham Cornes should be given a honorary membership.
http://www.news.com.au/sport/afl/essendon-players-could-never-have-been-found-guilty-by-anti-doping-tribunal/story-fndv7pj3-1227290405270
Essendon players could never have been found guilty by anti-doping tribunal
I told you so. Are they not the most infuriating words? Other than when they are attributed to the late soccer legend, Johnny Warren, they smack of arrogance and self-righteousness. Well I’m sorry, but I told you so.
The Essendon players could never have been found guilty of using a banned substance because they were never administered anything that was contrary to the WADA code.
The verdict of the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal could not have been any more emphatic. Given that the burden of proof before such a tribunal is nowhere near that of the laws of the land which have to prove “beyond reasonable doubt”, this verdict is actually a better outcome than “not guilty”.
The tribunal only had to find that it was “comfortably satisfied” that transgressions had occurred. It couldn’t, and the Essendon Football Club and its players can now try and pick up the pieces of their battered football lives.
They have shown, over the past two years, a great resilience in the face of a constant barrage of criticism and vilification. Can they maintain it now the pressure has been released?
But what of the critics, the bigots, the uniformed or those with an agenda that blinded them to the facts of the saga?
They constantly demanded that James Hird apologise when he had already done so. They ridiculed him and his wife Tania for daring to defend themselves.
They demanded suspensions for the innocent players. They painted the darkest possible picture of Australian football. They have no accountability. They either move on to their next victims or troll through the tribunal notes to salvage some credibility.
The best they have been able to come up with so far has been that a senior player, Mark McVeigh, questioned the injections and that an academic found some spelling mistakes in the consent forms that the players signed.
Oh, and there was a comment that the possible side effects of the substances weren’t on the consent forms. Really? Has anyone ever read the side effects of paracetamol, the most widely used painkiller?
McVeigh was a warrior on the football field, and a warrior off it. He would have been the one to ask what on earth he being given; there is no revelation in that.
However, he was more than emphatic in 2013 when he defended the allegations that the players didn’t know what they were given. He said: “Every player knew what we were taking … if you didn’t know, you must have been asleep in the meeting … Everything that I took, and I can only speak on my behalf obviously, I knew 100 per cent that it was within the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) and AFL doping regulations.”
Yet the critics, as they look for a distraction to their own follies, still perpetuate the myth that the players were not told what they were being injected with.
And what of ASADA? Its new chief executive, Ben McDevitt, who admittedly had to pick up the pieces of a flawed investigation, is trying to salvage some credibility by talking tough.
He would do better to focus on the criticisms of his investigators who face allegations that they conducted their interviews in the manner of aggressive police interrogations and that some evidence was recorded which was at odds with the players’ actual testimony. ASADA in its present form cannot survive the debacle of this saga.
Yet, despite the players’ innocence, there will be a victim from it all. Stephen Dank, the biochemist who masterminded this program which was going to be the most advanced in Australian football, will be put to the sword.
After all, someone has to pay for the millions of dollars, Essendon’s removal from the 2013 finals series and subsequent draft penalties.
Dank is adamant nothing contrary to the WADA code was administered to the Essendon players but he stands alone and is a soft target for the predators whose attention have now turned from Hird and his players to find a scapegoat.
This all started with a politically motivated stunt by two naive Federal ministers who are now long gone.
How appropriate that our current Prime Minister, with an acumen that belies his austere persona, should sum it up best: “I think, frankly, we have made mountains out of molehills”, he said.
I told you so!