JOHN COATES: 8 NOVEMBER 2019
Dear Mr Coates
You hold one of the most important places in not just Australian sport, but world sport. Your work has head of the Australian Olympic Committee has placed your organisation in a position of power not enjoyed by any other sporting body in Australia. Your work at the IOC level has given Australia sporting influence that is the envy of most other Olympic nations.
- Arguably, however, your most important role is that of President of the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Within that organisation lies the nexus of all trust between administrators and athletes at all levels – the place where people can go confident of a fair hearing should they fall into dispute. If that level of trust disappears, or is diminished, then all of sport is diminished.
- Right now, as more and more people call into question the CAS process and findings of guilty, and the resultant penalties imposed on 34 athletes contracted to the Essendon football club, trust in CAS is diminishing. In my circles it is at the bottom of the bird cage.
- Through my painstaking 15,000 hours research, aided by whistle blowers who share my concern about the lack of integrity in the CAS hearing of the WADA appeal against the exoneration of the 34 Essendon players by the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal, I now have irrefutable proof that Justice Spigelman and his two fellow panellists were incompetent and got it wrong, horribly wrong.
- How and why, they erred the way they did is the subject of great discussion among sports people at all levels in Australia. The evidence suggests the panellists were incompetent, biased and corrupt, according to my dictionary.
- My friends involved at the elite level where I played and worked for the past five decades say things to me like “surely with all the evidence they have now something will be done by the guru little Johnny Coates to right this wrong”.
- You need only to go the many sports blogs to read more and more the incredulity at the lack of action being taken at the official level to rectify the mistakes of the CAS panellists. Justice Spigelman’s false claim that Stephen Dank took possession of Thymosin Beta-4 enabled the panel to find the players guilty. Consequently, he also should be lobbying you to rectify his shameful mistake.
- The Herald Sun’s poll found that 80 per cent of more than 5000 readers believe there should be a Royal Commission into the way the Essendon players were treated by ASADA/WADA and CAS. That’s a damning turn around in public opinion on this matter.
- ASADA is painfully aware of the lack of respect it gets from the sporting public, causing the new CEO to embark on a public relations campaign that is being met more with derisory laughter than anything positive.
- As the head of CAS, as the man responsible for Justice Spigelman and his two fellow panellists, and by not taking any action to correct their errors, your reputation, too, is being diminished. If you don’t do anything you will have blood on your hands.
- Unlike the poor head of ASADA, you have the perfect opportunity to turn that around in one fell swoop. You have all the evidence you need to acknowledge that the CAS panel got it wrong, that the evidence used against the Essendon players was doctored, and that the case should never have gone beyond the AFL hearing and you will be doing not just yourself a huge favour, but sport in general as people, whether elite athletes or mums and dads of youngsters who might show a talent for sport, again feel confident that the processes set up to protect them do exactly that, rather than victimise them.
- Clean athletes deserve protection from dirty athletes. Clean athletes deserve protection from dirty officials.
- Using corrupt evidence, the CAS panel identified 16 strands in the cable that they believed justified the guilty findings. My attached dissection of the panel’s 16 strands proved, none of the strands had any validity.
Bruce Francis