Price of deal for players caught up in Cronulla Sharks' supplements scandal is reputation
Date
August 20, 2014 - 7:00PM
Andrew Webster
Chief Sports Writer, The Sydney Morning Herald
The reported offer on the table appears too good to be true: a backdated one-year ban, which means you miss precious little footy and some of the pre-season sandhills?
Where do I sign?
Of course, there’s always a hitch, and for Sharks players past and present it’s the admission they have doped. That they injected, ingested and rubbed on banned peptides allegedly meted out to them by sports scientist Stephen Dank. That all those public pleas and denials they had done nothing wrong were bullshit.
We’re drug cheats, let’s all move on. See you in November.
Could you live with that? Could you admit to taking a banned substance, when you don’t know if you’ve taken a banned substance? When it was your club who provided the substance in question?
Almost every player involved in this investigation has played the perfect game of poker.
Sandor Earl is the only one who blinked, and look where that got him: sucking down organic protein shakes in Phuket instead of playing football.
By virtue of his position at the club, his size and attitude on the field, Sharks captain Paul Gallen has had the most fingers pointed at him in the past 18 months.
He hasn’t blinked. He hasn’t run from the spotlight. Not afraid of a quid, he’s picked up more media gigs in the last year or so than Eddie McGuire. He’s good at them, and has become a strong voice in the game.
Whenever I’ve spoken to Gallen about the investigation, he’s never appeared like a player who's about to lose everything he’s worked for.
His interview on the Big Sports Breakfast on Wednesday morning, before he’d received a show-cause notice from the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, was telling.
“It’s your reputation,” he said. “It’s what I've built over the last 15-plus years in training full-time and getting to where I've got to in the game. That's tarnished now already, but if we do this we're going to be labelled a drug cheat, no matter what.”
Now, a 50 per cent discount is on the table. It falls under the World Anti-Doping Agency code that says there has been “no significant fault or negligence” on behalf of the player alleged to have taken the prohibited substance.
With all players being offered the deal, many statements provided to ASADA that some players had gone “off reservation” and seen Dank or his associate Darren Hibbert after the Sharks sacked Dank, have seemingly been ignored.
There is a provision under WADA rules that allows suspensions to be backdated. Surely other sports will watch this with interest – not least Essendon players, who have received show-cause notices but without the very tasty cream on top of a backdated ban.
It's staggering how fast ASADA can move when it wants.
Sharks players have been given two days to consider the deal. Having been tortured for 18 months by uncertainty due to a botched and politicised investigation, it shows how quickly chief executive Ben McDevitt wants this finished.
We can only hope there are larger scalps on the agenda for McDevitt, with no deals for a hasty conclusion on offer.
