Drugs scandal: Essendon players have a case to answer
Reuters/Melbourne
Australia's national anti-doping agency has charged 34 current and former Australian Rules football players with drugs violations, rocking the country's richest and most well-attended sport.
The charges are the culmination of a 16-month investigation into the administration of dubious supplements in 2012 at the Melbourne-based Essendon Bombers, one of the Australian Football League's oldest and most powerful teams.
"The Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) has put formal allegations of possible anti-doping rule violations to 34 current and former players from the Australian Football League (AFL)," the agency said in a statement yesterday.
"Based on the advice of our legal counsel and a review of the evidence... I have reached the conclusion that these players have a case to answer under the World Anti-Doping Code," ASADA CEO Ben McDevitt said.
The AFL disqualified Essendon from the competition's playoffs last year, banned the club's head coach James Hird for 12 months and slapped the team with a record fine for bringing the full-contact indigenous game into disrepute.
The punishments followed an independent probe commissioned by the club which found governance failures had contributed to a "disturbing picture of a pharmacologically experimental environment".
ASADA is also investigating the administration of banned supplements to multiple players at one of the country's top-flight rugby league teams, the Sydney-based Cronulla Sharks, and is expected to lay charges in coming days.
Stephen Dank, a sports scientist formerly employed by Essendon and who also worked with the Sharks, was charged by ASADA in March for his part in the supplements programme at Essendon but has yet to face further action.
The scandal, which has overshadowed two AFL seasons, has unearthed grisly details about a club's determination to seek an edge in the country's premier sports competition.
Local newspapers have reported details of players being taken away from their training base to be injected with peptides in private clinics.
The players have 10 days to respond to the charges, which ASADA refer to as 'show cause notices'.
The club lies ninth in the 18-team table, halfway through the AFL's regular season.
Essendon declined to comment but issued a statement that chairman Paul Little would face the media later on Friday.
New AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan, who has walked into a firestorm after replacing long-serving boss Andrew Demetriou last week, said the charges were "just the start of a long process".