One letter makes a huge difference for the Bombers

Whereas the AFL Drug Tribunal focused on whether Essendon players had been administered thymosin-beta 4 or not, the Court of Arbitration for Sport focused on what the players hadn't done. The difference between comission and omission — that pesky c — is the difference that saw the thirty-four past and present Essendon players banned today.

In the absence of positive drug testing results, the AFL Drug Tribunal’s hearing looked at what substances Steven Dank may have obtained, where he may have obtained them and who may have transmuted them into a useable form. It’s not too strong to say that Dank and his associates operated at the margins, so there were more holes in the chain of custody than a pair of fishnets.

WADA, on the other hand, had a telling precedent where no positive had been recorded — Lance Armstrong. They knew that circumstantial evidence could get them their desired result. And it wasn't hard to find.

The failure of the players to list the supplements that Dank was providing on their ASADA drug testing forms was the golden bullet. Anyone who is mystified or bemused about this decision need only read the CAS report to understand that.

Had the supplements been WADA-compliant, they could have been, and should have been, listed on the drug-tested players’ reports of supplements they'd used. It’s a red flag that no players filling out those forms listed the Dank-supplied supplements. And these players had all received the yearly AFL education about anti-doping testing and how to stay ‘clean’.

WADA and CAS inferred from the failure to list the Dank-supplied supplements that the substances weren’t WADA-compliant, and further, that the non-listing was an organised activity.

While the administration of non-compliant substances was very difficult to prove, proving the failure to list supplements was as easy as falling from a slippery log. Difficult-to-prove commission versus easy to prove omission.

There are further questions to be answered.

How complicit were club staff in the attempt to evade ASADA detection? That one might be answered in civil proceedings.

How were ASADA so woefully inept in their handling of this entire episode? That’s one for the politicians.

And will Andrew Demetriou’s fingerprints ever be erased from this whole saga? That one is for history.