Back in 2012 a sports scientist named Stephen Dank approached clubs in both the AFL and Rugby League competitions with a plan to speed recovery from sporting injuries. This involved injections of a chemical known as "peptides " - and here it seems that clarity was lost. Various types of peptides skirt the borders of legality and illegality under the drug code and tests drew the ire of the Australian Anti Doping Agency - ASADA. They say they detected a substance named TB4 in Rugby League players from the Cronulla club and Australian Rules players from Essendon.
From that point, utter confusion reigned. At one stage an AFL tribunal cleared Essendon players, only to have ASADA take the matter to the Court of Administration for Sport ( CAS ). Meanwhile Cronulla Rugby League club decided to take a "deal "on offer. They entered a negotiated plea of guilty and were given a light punishment that virtually lifted bans on the basis of "time served "!
Three long years have dragged by with this Essendon charge unresolved, and now it seems that CAS has decided to make an example of that club - and may see one of the original clubs of the Australian Rules competition totally disappear an a sporting entity. It has placed bans on thirty-four of the club's players from 2012 - which will see them miss the entire 2016 playing season.
The only reasonable interpretation is that CAS is sending a message to the sporting world. If you dare challenge a charge brought by ASADA and seek to provide evidence of innocence the big guns of the CAS will be levelled at your head and draconian penalties will be imposed to completely destroy all and everyone associated with your club.
Performing advancement drugs have distorted sports results for many years. We know that some countries have an official program to "dope " their Olympic athletes to win medals because sporting success is demanded at the highest levels of government. Drug use in cycling is so rampant that it seems to be more a matter of "who 'isnt using drugs " that raises eyebrows ! A whole army of chemists and an entire industry is churning out new combinations specifically designed to be invisible to the testing regimes.
What is clear in this whole sorry peptides affair is that the actual players involved had no idea what was being injected. They were assured that this was quite legal and was intended to speed recovery from sporting industries. If there was deception, it is impossible to accurately pin point the source, and it is highly likely that for most that good faith was involved, but the CAS finding seems to label them guilty of deliberately cheating the system.
What is clear is that any sporting investigation should not drag on for three years before it comes to a conclusion - and when that conclusion delivers an entirely different scale of punishment for exactly the same offence - then justice has not been served.
Essendon Football club has agreed that it will reluctantly accept the verdict - and move on. Australian sport will walk away with a bad taste in it's mouth. This whole matter was badly handled - and it seems that no lesson has been learned !
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