What went down at Essendon

Photo: Getty Images.

We hear often of young, highly paid athletes going off the rails when showered with cash and adulation before they have the maturity and self-awareness to cope. In fact we journalists are probably guilty of a fascination with these lurid tales, often over and above the quieter achievers who keep their lives on track.

Not this month! Quite coincidentally, none of our three major profile subjects has a single blemish to their gold-karat reputations – in fact this might be called our “brilliant” edition. In Daly Cherry-Evans (rugby league), Tom Rogic (soccer) and Dante Exum (basketball), we have a study in three parts of young model Australian sporting excellence.

It can be argued that the single-minded drive and self-absorption that characterises many champion athletes borders on a kind of personality defect. Well, these three blokes are by all accounts the counter-argument to that contention: that a young man can certainly keep his head screwed on and feet on the ground IF he has the right people around him and the right values stamped on his upbringing.

Which would NOT explain what happened at the Essendon Football Club in 2011/12. What a bizarre saga it has been since their dramatic self-reporting last year, just a few days before the ASADA and Australian Crime Commission report that became the so-called “blackest day in Australian sport”. As we went to press, we could finally say that this story was actually standing still long enough for us to draw a bead on what happened and why – though there is obviously more to be played out there (it certainly won’t be a closed case until we hear a full account from the man who appears to be at the centre of the team’s “supplement” program, Stephen Dank).

Robert Drane was our writer charged with piecing together this account of what went down at the club, which you can read beginning on page 42. It is a bizarre and compelling story of a team’s culture going off the rails. But arguably not for the simplistic reasons many might assume.

The day elite athletes, gold-karat reputations or not, are allowed to be used as human experiments by injecting substances of uncertain effect into their bodies in the quest for results is ... well, let’s not be naive here. This kind of thing has been going on for decades.

Why would anyone think for a moment that it would never happen in this country, in football? How can we even assume that these kinds of programs haven’t been going on for decades, in one form or another?