Essendon doping: ‘job-lot’ ban bars coach Mark McVeigh from job
THE AUSTRALIANJANUARY 14, 2016 12:00AM
Chip Le Grand
For Mark McVeigh, the impact of the unprecedented doping bans imposed on a generation of Essendon players was immediate and severe.
The morning the Court of Arbitration for Sport handed down his judgment, McVeigh was ordered to leave Greater Western Sydney’s Homebush training ground and stay away from the club until further notice.
The phone call from club football manager Graeme Allan midway through a pre-season training session was apologetic but firm. McVeigh, Essendon’s 2012 vice-captain now employed as an assistant coach at the Giants, can’t be anywhere near the players. The same restriction applies to all of the Essendon 34 retired from the AFL but working or playing football with country and suburban clubs around the country. Strictly speaking, they are banned from every level of organised sport.
As lawyers for the players continue scouring the CAS judgment for possible grounds for appeal, McVeigh has good reason to feel unfairly treated. He was one of seven Essendon players who the CAS asked to appear and give evidence at last November’s five-day hearing in Sydney. He expected that his individual circumstances would be carefully considered.
Instead, the 34 players were dealt with as a job lot.
The potential injustice in such an approach is in the detail. A majority of the three-man CAS panel were willing to accept that since Stephen Dank’s pre-season plan was to use Thymosin Beta 4 as the “jewel in the crown’’ of his supplements regime, and since all 34 players gave written consent to be treated with Thymosin, anyone who received an injection from Dank must have taken the banned peptide.
The circumstances surrounding McVeigh and every player, however, are unique.
At the start of Essendon’s 2012 season, McVeigh had a baby daughter at home. He told the CAS hearing he received about five or six injections from Dank, all to help him sleep. Before each injection, he asked what the substance was. Each time Dank told him it was Melanotan, a peptide which, among other properties, can assist sleep.
He told CAS he did not receive any other injections. Melanotan is not a banned substance. There was ample evidence before CAS that Dank used Melanotan at Essendon. He injected it into staff and coaches. He shared it with his high-performance manager, Dean Robinson. This was the peptide the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority investigators suspect turned James Hird a vibrant shade of orange during a trip to Coolum.
Yet CAS was not willing to accept that McVeigh was given Melanotan and not Thymosin Beta-4. The reason? Because the injections didn’t improve his tan. Melanotan is primarily used as a tanning agent.
Among CAS’s reasons for being “comfortably satisfied’’ that all players were given Thymosin Beta-4, the judgment notes: “Players such as McVeigh, who said that he was told he was receiving Melatonan (sic), did not, on his own vehement admission, experience any tanning effect from it, although that is one of its well-known properties.
“The players after signature of their consent form did not know with what they were being injected and would never had been able to say what it was, other than from what they were told by Mr Dank, who once he had their consent, had no particular interest in giving them an accurate account.’’
This logic is at the heart of CAS’s reasons for finding all 34 players guilty of a doping offence and banning them for two years. Only six players recalled being injected with something called Thymosin. For the other 28, including McVeigh, CAS assumed this is what they were given.
It is a bold assumption, given the exotic array of substances Dank used at Essendon in 2012. Among these is Melatonin, an injectable sleeping agent that doesn’t have a tanning effect. Australian Sports Anti-Doping investigators recovered a bottle of Melatonin from the fridge inside Dank’s basement office.
One CAS member, believed to be former NSW Supreme Court chief justice James Spigelman, did not share the confidence of his fellow panellists. He was satisfied the World Anti-Doping Agency made its case against some players but dissented from the finding that all 34 were guilty.
On the question of penalty, McVeigh was not given credit for challenging the supplements regime within the football club and demanding that all players be given more information. Although CAS criticised all players for failing to declare any injections on doping control forms, McVeigh did not have cause to fill out a form until he ceased receiving injections from Dank.
AFL Players Association chief executive Paul Marsh said a perplexing aspect of the CAS majority finding was its “one size fits all’’ reasoning. “It just didn’t seem to take into account any individual circumstance and the individual evidence presented by the players,’’ he said. “There were 34 separate pieces of evidence given here. It is difficult to comprehend how they came to a one-size fits all outcome when there were 34 different sets of circumstances.’’
The 34 players are yet to accept the decision of the Swiss-based tribunal, which overturned last year’s finding by an AFL tribunal chaired by retired Victorian County Court judge David Jones.
Essendon captain Jobe Watson, acting as a spokesman for the players, said they were devastated by the CAS finding. For Watson, the 2012 season Brownlow Medallist, the doping verdict carries an additional penalty. The AFL Commission is scheduled to meet next month to decide whether to rescind his award.
“We are struggling to come to terms with this decision, and feel it does not support the players’ firm belief that we are innocent,’’ Watson said in a brief statement issued by Essendon. “Our legal team is conducting a thorough review of the decision and will explore any avenues available to us.’’
The lawyers for the players are hopeful of appealing the case before the Victorian Supreme Court. If jurisdiction cannot be established there, the Swiss Federal Tribunal also looms as a possibility, though less likely. To successfully appeal anywhere, the players must prove CAS made an error in law in reaching the finding it did.
Once time served through provisional suspension is deducted and backdating is applied to the two-year bans, the players are suspended until November. For current players, it will be an entire season lost. Exactly what it means for those who have moved into coaching remains unclear.