AUTHOR’S NOTE – WHY I BECAME INVOLVED

1. Essendon assistant coach Mark Thompson phoned me in late June 2013 and asked me if I would investigate the progress of the Australia Football League (AFL)/Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) investigation into the alleged taking of World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) prohibited substances at Essendon in 2012.
2. Thompson felt deeply aggrieved at Essendon’s legal team failure to pull then AFL chief executive officer Andrew Demetriou into line for regularly implying during the AFL/ ASADA investigation that the players were not only guilty of taking WADA prohibited substances but that he and coach James Hird were responsible.
3. Thompson also believed that it was not only unconscionable for Demetriou to sit on the ‘jury’ if charges were laid but it was wrong for the other ‘jury’ members (the AFL commissioners) to be told of guilt findings and punishments before the investigation had been completed and charges laid.
4. As I didn’t know Thompson and as I didn’t know a single Essendon player or supporter, I had no skin in the game. I therefore believed that I could be objective and accepted the commission. I turned down Thompson’s offer to pay me for the project.
5. I spent over 20,000 hours, yes, 20,000 hours, on the project and collected about 30,000 pages that I have in over 100 arch-lever folders. I have written over two million words on the subject.
6. My credibility and honesty not only to undertake such a project and to write a 158-page submission to the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) into whether Sport Integrity Australia had established fit-for-purpose governance arrangements was encapsulated in an email I sent to then ASADA chief executive Ben McDevitt at 3:40 pm on 6 March 2016.
7. Inter alia, it said: ‘Dear Mr McDevitt, as you are aware, I dissected eight comments from your Senate Estimates appearance on Thursday, 3 March 2016. I was extremely critical of your comments. My dissection was based upon the Hansard transcript. Hansard stated that you said: “The 34 players signed consent forms agreeing to thymosin beta-4 injections and each of them admitted to receiving a number of injections.” ‘The video indicates that Hansard is wrong, and therefore I am wrong. Hansard mistakenly added the word ‘beta-4’ after thymosin. You clearly only said thymosin. I sincerely apologise for my mistake in saying: “This is a lie. No player signed a consent form agreeing to Thymosin Beta-4 injections.’”
8. In all modesty, I don’t think many people in the world would have cross-checked Hansard with the video to ensure accuracy. Less would have apologised and embarrassed himself to a large number of journalists to whom I ccd, who were copied on the original email.
9. Further evidence of my integrity occurred on 17 December 1978, when I turned down a certain $500,000 winning bet with Kerry Packer at his 41^st birthday dinner at home because I believed a bet had to have an element of risk and I knew the answer of the disputed question because I had participated in the match under debate.
10. Kerry subsequently slammed me to friends and urged Tony Greig to sack me as his manager for being too soft to take his money. This anecdote was reproduced, with James Packer’s permission, in former England cricket captain Tony Greig’s biography written by his mother Joycie and son Mark.