COMMENT
Omertà.
Outspoken: Former Essendon and Geelong coach Mark Thompson. Photo: Getty Images
Omertà. Everyone in road cycling knows what it means. Anyone who has paid even passing attention to that sport in recent years does, too.
To the incognisant: omertà, in sport's most notorious examples, has described an unspoken, sworn agreement to building a cone of silence around banned drug use and a concerted, collective – though again largely unspoken – effort to ensuring that remains in place. There will be no cooperation with authorities seeking to burst bubbles. There will be no interference in contraband culture. Whistleblowers, even sceptics, are not welcome. They will be ostracised and frozen out.
Athletes, coaches, medical staff, administrators and media have been proven to be complicit in this nod and wink mentality that's designed – albeit misguidedly – to have the greatest interests of a sport at heart.
There is no better example in international sport than the case of drug cheat Lance Armstrong, whose accolades and associated fame were for years considered more important to the reputation of cycling than integrity. That was until the US Anti-Doping Agency, and a dogged investigator named Travis Tygart, saw that this illusion came to a devastating, though ultimately cleansing, end.
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In the comparatively small world of AFL football, omertà hasn't been in common parlance like it has in the pro road cycling ranks. If there is hard evidence that anything even resembling the endemic drug culture that infected that sport has existed in footy then that evidence remains unearthed.
But it is naïve to think a culture of silence when it comes to banned drug use – or even perceived use of banned drugs in the AFL's elite competition – has not existed.
The fact that it's such a rarity for anyone of note from within the game to even hint that anything suggestive of omertà in the AFL is precisely what made a mere couple of sentences from former Geelong and Essendon coach Mark Thompson on Wednesday night so outstanding.
Asked about the latest messy developments in the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority's investigations into banned drugs and AFL footballers – namely former Gold Coast Suns vice-captain Nathan Bock – Thompson said this to Fox Footy's AFL 360 program:
"Everybody basically knew that, out of all the AFL players. that he [Bock] was probably more guilty than most.
"And for them [ASADA] to charge 34 [Essendon players] and not know who the 34 were … and some obviously weren't guilty, but to know that someone that was almost guilty, and [for him] to get off, is a bit of a worry."
Thompson's use of the word "everybody" knowing about Bock's case is certainly blanket. But for anyone who cares about integrity in the AFL – more pointedly: how inhibited those within the game might have felt, historically, about raising even suspicions about banned drug use formally – these comments from a multiple premiership coach warrant more than passing contemplation.
Harking back to another chapter in the AFL's hellish drug controversy, the same applies to sentiments revealed to have been expressed in text messages between former Essendon coach James Hird and architect of the Bombers' doomed injection program Stephen Dank in August, 2011.
The text messages in question clearly show Hird and Dank discussed and were at the very least suspicious about practices at fellow AFL sides Collingwood, Hawthorn and the West Coast Eagles. While suspicions of this nature are frankly baseless unless proved – the aforementioned were not and the links were also immediately and fiercely dispelled by the three clubs implicated – these Dank/Hird exchanges revealed another layer of omertà culture. The then-head AFL club coach and his self-styled sport scientist guru were happy to freely text each other in this way about rival teams, but did Hird and Dank lodge the information with ASADA or the AFL? If they didn't, why not?
The AFL will rightly bristle at any inference there has been a culture of silence around performance-enhancing substances or practices in its sport that's in any way comparable to cycling's now globally documented drug-riddled past. But omertà does not merely encompass proven banned drug use in a sport. It speaks to how drug use – even suspected drug use – is spoken of inside a sport.
The 'group think' of Essendon players that led intelligent and honest men to participate in Dank's secret injection program that now sees them serving bans for breaking doping rules also shows how devastating omertà principles can be. Even more sadly if – as in this case – those punished may never have dreamt of being part of anything vaguely dangerous, let alone potentially sinister or illegal.
Even glimpses of fresh insight into how those inside footy really think and talk about banned drugs – like what Thompson shared this week about Bock – should be regarded with utmost seriousness.
If the AFL's ears were not pricked by Thompson's latest take on a sore in the competition that is unhealed more than three years after surfacing, it either needs its ears checked or it is guilty of selective hearing.