Good summary of situation so far.
Former Labor Senator John Black is rightly suspicious of the press conference that launched the astonishing smear of Australian sport:
JOHN Black, the former Labor senator who in the late 1980s chaired the first government-appointed inquiry into drugs in sport in Australia, has labelled the present Australian Crime Commission investigation as “amateur hour"…
The Black inquiry, conducted nearly a quarter of a century ago, covered virtually the same ground being explored by the ACC…
But he has little regard for the way the present investigation has been handled and sympathises with innocent athletes and sports angered by the fact they have been embroiled in what he views as a fairly cynical political exercise.
“Well, why the hell wouldn’t they (be angry)?” he asked. “It was just amateur hour. You looked at it and you thought, ‘Oh my god, this is going to end in tears.’ But it kept the Eddie Obeid (ICAC) inquiry off the front pages for a week, so that was the purpose of it.
”It was clearly some kind of media diversion but it was at the expense of sport...”
One more allegation - raised in the media following the press conference fronted by two Gillard Government ministers - is just a farcical blunder:
CONCERNS $40 million was wagered on an A-League game by Asian punters have been put to rest after Football Federation Australia revealed the figure was in fact eight times less…
And the discrepancy was blamed on the media, which ”reported the estimated figure in Australian dollars instead of the correct denomination of Hong Kong dollars”.
Even the classified version of the ACC report has nothing police feel worth investigating:
THE Australian Crime Commission did not gather any new information about organised crime or doping in sport through telephone taps as part of its 12-month intelligence operation, which Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Ken Lay says has not provided any basis for a criminal investigation…
The lack of specific, suspected crimes documented within the classified version of the ACC report has prompted Mr Lay to seek more information from the federal agency. Mr Lay said Victoria Police had examined both the published and unpublished versions of the report and not found any information on which to base a criminal investigation…
“The advice available to us is there is little for us to investigate,” Mr Lay told Radio 3AW’s Neil Mitchell.
This is amazing.
I repeat: the five sports chiefs who were dragooned into Labor’s press conference to smear Australian sport should call another press conference to clear it.
UPDATE
More farce. The head of anti-doping agency admits “there is not a positive test anywhere in any of this”:
Yet more farce - and what sounds to me too much like a bit of guessing-as-we-go-along:
ASADA chief executive Aurora Andruska estimated that up to 150 players and officials across the codes would be interviewed as part of the investigations but she admitted that figure was only an educated guess.
‘’A lot of pressure has been put on me in recent times to try and come up with a number, particularly from the media, so I decided to come up with some number that was realistic with the information that I had at the time,’’ she said.
‘’When I have come up with that number I have taken into account that we would need to talk to administrators and players and others that would be associated with whatever was going on so at this early stage of the investigation that is my best estimate.
‘’Having said that it could widen because I am reading things in the media about people admitting to taking performance-enhancing drugs that I was not even aware of...”
When the 150 figure came out it was reported as if that’s how many athletes and staff were potentially guilty. Now it’s a guess at how many people may be asked about stuff that might not be a problem anyway.
....
