Dank blaming everyone else again including the Essendon players.
Stephen Dank says he would 'do it again'Claire Siracusa
The Age
March 2, 2015The sports scientist at the centre of the Essendon supplements scandal, Stephen Dank, says that Essendon players knew exactly what they were given and that if he was approached by another club, he would "do it again".Speaking on Triple R radio on Sunday morning, Dank said that he did nothing at the club that he didn't have permission to do.
"The immediate answer to that is, yes, I would do it again," he told The Party Show. "Don't forget ... there was nothing that we did that we did not have permission for. There was nothing that we did that no one had any issues with and we certainly didn't do anything that wasn't discussed well throughout the club infrastructure."
Dank said that the players knew exactly what they were given, including things to take home, and that all the substances from the program have "some sort of approval somewhere in the world".
"In the early days when we first started ... any player who could not say what we were giving them, what they were taking it for, what the benefit was, they weren't allowed to take it or have it until they sat down and I went through that again," he said. Dank said he and then high performance manager Dean Robinson enforced this until players were "coherent with that information".
Dank also detailed the substances used at Essendon. "These substances are well and truly part of an established landscape in terms of medicine in this country and overseas. All of these substances have some sort of approval somewhere in the world, for use, both therapeutically and in a general medicial sense," he said
"These substances were prepared in a high-grade pharmaceutical facility. So there were again a lot of furphies that had sort of got out there about stuff that was dangerous, stuff that had come in from China. It really had got to a ludicrous proportion."
Dank said "everything was very, very well documented" and that more than half a dozen people at Essendon know what went on during his time there.
"There was certainly a tremendous amount of governance and diligence in relation to the program." he said.
"The furphy that there was no record keeping, the furphy that no one knew what was happening, I mean, to be perfectly honest, they are just lies that have been propagated by both the AFL and ASADA to help construct an ending to suit their means."
Dank said he had detailed records, which he had left at Essendon.
"It was certainly left on the club intranet," he said. "Those records recorded every player on a spreadsheet for every day, every week, every month of the season.
"You probably need to ask Essendon Football Club [where they are]."
"I can say for sure that those records were kept ... after my leaving the club. And that has been verified through an external body."
"You would need to discuss with both the AFL and the Essendon Football Club why they have tried to perpetrate the line that these records don't exist."
He claimed the AFL would do "whatever they can to imply [Essendon] have done something wrong and suspend them".
"If you think about what truly is given to athletes around the world to performance enhance - true doping charges, true doping substances - if it was systematic and as deep as they try to imply that it is, surely the guys should get two years and not two weeks," he said.
"In terms of the whole performance biology I would say it was a five to six percenter... It was never set up to be performance enhancement. It was certainly biological management in relation to tissue loads and tissue stress. And it didn't even come close to some of the more important things we were doing in terms of physiological adaptation for performance.
"The guys down in Canberra and the guys down in AFL House would have you think that there was some Lance Armstrong-type moment in terms of what we were running ... if I was doing something that was performance-enhancement, it certainly wouldn't represent the program at Essendon Football Club."
Dank said he would not be defending himself at the AFL Tribunal, which he described as a "kangaroo court", but that he would defend himself "in the legal jurisdiction where this is warranted".
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/stephen-dank-says-he-would-do-it-again-20150301-13s29k.html
