In what Australian rules football administrators described as a “stain on our game”, 34 players involved in Essendon’s supplement program in 2012 were suspended for the 2016 season. “Which raises another scenario; if two or more players on the Australia team end up being found guilty of doping offences the match result could be null and void”.
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Essendon chairman Lindsay Tanner was adamant Watson should keep the medal.
Thirty-four past and present players from the Essendon Bombers professional Australian Rules football team, one of the country’s richest football clubs, have been issued with two-year bans for doping in a ruling that stunned the sports-mad nation.
In Australia’s biggest doping scandal in domestic sport, Essendon were heavily sanctioned by the AFL in 2013 after a joint investigation with the country’s national anti-doping authority uncovered an organised and highly dubious regime of supplement injections given to players.
In a shock reversal of the AFL Tribunal decision that cleared the players last March, the court was comfortably satisfied that the 34 had taken the banned substance thymosin beta-4 in 2012.
Australian team sports should consider following United States professional sporting bodies including the National Football League and become voluntary members of the World Anti-Doping Agency code, the Greens say.
“There were very little grounds for the players to claim they were at no significant fault”, McDevitt said in a statement on Tuesday.
McLachlan said the CAS decision to uphold the Wada suspensions was a “devastating decision” for the players affected.
The full board of the AFL Commission will meet in February to decide whether Jobe Watson’s Brownlow medal, awarded as the fairest and best player in the AFL for 2012, will stand. Watson will be invited to address the commission meeting.
AFL Chief Executive Gillon McLachlan said he was fully committed to keeping the code clean but suggested the players had been misled.
Under the “strand in a cable” analysis, each piece of evidence, or “strand”, was not required to bear the entire weight of the standard of proof – because some of the weight could be carried by the other strands.
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He said it was unrealistic to expect young, impressionable players who are playing alongside their heroes to speak out against them.
“We are struggling to understand how the CAS decision can be so different to that of the AFL anti-doping tribunal”.
“The players and their representatives made the decisions that they made – they were the decisions for the players, they were the discussions they were having with ASADA”, he said.
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Akermanis said he felt sorry for the suspended players, laying the blame on the club.
