Essendon Football Club supplements saga

After four years of investigations and legal proceedings, thirty-four players at the club were found guilty of having used the banned peptide Thymosin beta-4 and incurred suspensions.

In August 2013, the AFL fined Essendon $2 million, barred the club from the 2013 finals series, and suspended senior coach James Hird and general manager Danny Corcoran as a result of these findings.

[3] The program primarily comprised subcutaneous injections of supplements to improve soft tissue recovery times, to enable players to endure and benefit from a heavier training workload.

[3] Evidence showed that Dank continued to liaise with sports scientists and pharmacists to seek new supplements into August; investigations later described the program as being often experimental in nature.

[7] Essendon's on-field performances during the 2012 season began strongly and finished weakly, a coincidence which was later scrutinised in the context of the program.

The CAS acknowledged these observations in its findings, noting that they carried no weight as evidence but describing them as "at least not inconsistent" with the timeline of the program.

[3] Essendon captain Jobe Watson won the 2012 Brownlow Medal as the league's fairest and best player, the game's most prestigious individual award,[8] a title later stripped from him as a result of the supplements saga.

During the early phase of the investigation, much attention and media speculation fell on the anti-obesity supplement AOD-9604, which had appeared on consent forms and was acknowledged to have been administered in the program, including by Essendon captain Jobe Watson during a television interview.

[17] Parallel to the AFL-ASADA investigation, Essendon commissioned former Telstra CEO Ziggy Switkowski to conduct a full independent review of governance and processes of the club.

On 23 May 2013, Essendon CEO Ian Robson resigned, agreeing with the Switkowski report's assessment that a lack of proper process had occurred in 2012.

On 27 August 2013, five days before the final round of the 2013 home-and-away season, the following penalties were agreed to and imposed: As part of the agreement, Hird dropped legal action that he had raised against the charges in the Supreme Court.

The league's official statement concluded: "Reid strongly supports the AFL in its fundamental priority of looking after the health and welfare of players.

The AFL initially demanded that the payments stopped when they were made public in December 2013 but acquiesced after determining that its legal position was weak.

At the time of the penalties for governance failures, no charges were laid against any players, whether or not banned substances had been used was unproven, and the ASADA and AFL investigation remained open.

[32] Under the anti-doping codes, players found guilty would receive, as a starting point, a two-year suspension; however, if they were able to demonstrate they were unwittingly given a prohibited substance, they may have been eligible for a 50 per cent reduction.

[33] The names of the 34 players were initially suppressed under court order, and were formally released only after the eventual guilty verdict in January 2016.

While this was progressing, Essendon performed well under Mark Thompson during the 2014 season, finishing seventh on the ladder and being eliminated in the first week of the finals.

Hird, however, acting in an individual capacity and "on a matter of principle", appealed the ruling to a full bench of the Federal Court.

On 13 November 2014, the Anti-Doping Rule Violation Panel concluded that sufficient evidence existed against the players, and they were placed on the register of findings.

This meant that the thirty-four players, including seventeen still at Essendon, would be under provisional suspension during the 2015 NAB Challenge pre-season matches.

This was considered a surprise, as press throughout the entire saga had opined that by having followed the direction of club officials, the players would be found to have had no significant fault or negligence, qualifying them for a 50% penalty reduction.

[64] Key to this finding was the revelation that none of the eighteen different players who had been drug tested on a total of thirty occasions during the program had declared the supplements injections on their doping control forms, and that some had withheld information from the club doctor on Dank's instruction – revelations which damaged the credibility of other evidence put forward by the players.

[75] On 15 November 2016, after the final avenue for appeal had been exhausted with the Federal Supreme Court, the AFL Commission reviewed the 2012 Brownlow Medal, which had been won by Jobe Watson as the fairest and best player in the league during the season in which the supplements program was in effect.

Watson was stripped of the medal, and it was awarded jointly to the players who polled the second-most votes: Trent Cotchin (Richmond) and Sam Mitchell (Hawthorn).

[8] Watson had pre-empted the decision to strip him of the award, announcing his intention to hand back the medal four days earlier.

The club received permission to recruit ten top-up players from lower levels on contracts lasting until 31 October 2016 to supplement its list.

[80][81] By September 2017, the club had reached out-of-court compensation deals with all players, covering potential and actual loss of earnings and mental anguish; the sizes of the deals were confidential, but the largest payouts were understood to have gone to Jobe Watson, who was stripped of the Brownlow Medal, and Stewart Crameri, who missed the Western Bulldogs' 2016 premiership.

[87] Ten of the twelve suspended players re-signed with Essendon for 2017;[88][89] the two who departed were Michael Hibberd, who was traded to Melbourne,[90] and Tayte Pears, who retired.

[95] The AFL Tribunal heard cases against sports scientist Stephen Dank during the summer of 2014/15, and he was found guilty of ten charges.

[100] Most of the club's expenses related to the scandal, including legal bills and the payout to Robinson, were covered by Essendon's insurers, Chubb Limited.