It’s Swimming Australia that should be ashamed, not Jack
They’re supposed to be looking after our nation’s most promising swimmers, but instead Swimming Australia has hung Mack Horton and Shayna Jack out to dry in a bid to save their own skin, writes David Penberthy.
One of the perils of writing to a deadline about current affairs is that stories can change.
It’s not often that they change at the exact moment an article is published, but that’s what happened last Sunday when the biggest sports story of the previous week — Mack Horton’s pointed snubbing of the accused Chinese drug cheat Sun Yang — was overshadowed by revelations that the Australian swimming team might be home to its own drug cheat, too.
Having written this column last week in defence of Horton’s right to protest, and the baseless indignation of China in bristling at his conduct, I spent much of last Sunday shaking my head in disbelief at the fact Swimming Australia had been sitting on its own juicy scandal that would make us look like a nation of hypocrites.
While the criticisms of Yang and China still stand, the galling thing about Swimming Australia is that, if the worst of what’s being claimed is true, this organisation has damaged our reputation to the point where we no longer have any moral authority to lecture anyone about the doping question.
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The swimmer in question is Shayna Jack, a 20-year-old Queenslander who has tested positive twice to the non-steroidal anabolic agent Ligandrol.
Jack denies she knowingly took the drug, having initially cited personal reasons for leaving last month’s swimming titles in South Korea, only to have her positive drugs test leaked to the media last weekend.
Through her lawyer, she has argued she inadvertently took a contaminated legal supplement, which will form the basis of her defence at the ASADA hearing, with a career-ending, four-year ban hanging over her head.
The manner in which Swimming Australia has conducted itself since these revelations deserves harsh scrutiny.
It seems to me that the organisation — which is run by adults — has badly let down not one but two of the young athletes in its apparent care.
The first of these is Mack Horton, who has every right to feel like he was hung out to dry and made to look a hypocrite by making such a bold anti-doping statement when Swimming Australia was sitting on a dirty little secret of its own.
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The second is Shayna Jack, who is entitled to a fair and unbiased hearing, but whose credibility suffered a pre-emptive blow via an extraordinary letter sent to all Aussie swimmers and their parents by Swimming Australia chief executive Leigh Russell.
To be clear, there are two versions of events at play here.
Swimming Australia insists it could not say anything about Jack’s case ahead of the finalisation of the ASADA investigation.
“Under the process, all details are required to remain confidential until ASADA has completed its investigations, the athlete is afforded due process and an outcome determined,” Ms Russell said last Saturday.
Four days later, Jack’s version of the story started to emerge, where rather than Swimming Australia standing by due process as outlined above, it was actually Swimming Australia that was telling Jack to keep her mouth shut.
Jack claims that, apart from the fact Swimming Australia prevented her from even saying goodbye to her teammates when she was told about the test results at training camp earlier this month, they also repeatedly advised her not to tell any of her friends.
But by the length of an Olympic pool, the worst of Swimming Australia’s conduct came in the form of the letter Ms Russell sent to the swimmers and their families.
“It was Shayna’s decision when to speak on her matter and she told us that given the team was in competition mode at a benchmark event, her decision was to speak at the conclusion of the worlds, so that her teammates could fully focus on performance,” Russell wrote.
“She told us she wanted to announce the matter this week and was preparing to do so.”
Whatever duty of care this organisation has to its young athletes would appear to have been violated by this extraordinary missive. It reads as if Swimming Australia is simply trying to wash its hands of any responsibility for the manner in which this drug test has been handled.
Worse, it reads as if Swimming Australia is trying to wash its hands of Shayna Jack.
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Perversely, it almost feels as if Swimming Australia has been boxed into taking this pre-emptive heavy-handed stand against Jack on account of Horton’s podium protest.
And again, if Jack had been allowed to speak out about her failed test — while also maintaining her innocence — Horton would have undoubtedly approach his protest somewhat differently, and possibly not have done it at all.
Instead, as a result of Swimming Australia’s ham-fisted conduct, we’ve got a kid who’s been left floundering in the deep end by an organisation that’s more interested in covering its own backside, and a principled young bloke who has made an internationally-explosive protest against the biggest nation on earth, who now looks like a bit of a fraud.
Take a bow, Swimming Australia. This is all your own work. And to think you’re the ones who are meant to be looking after these young people.