SACKED: Stewart Crameri opens up on ASADA’s investigation into the Bombers’ drug saga

Stewart Crameri maintains the innocence of the Essendon 34 in the controversial drugs saga that occurred over a decade ago, saying the players were manipulated into sitting down with ASADA.

Essendon 34 member Stewart Crameri says the banned group of Bombers will go to their graves believing they were duped and “manipulated” into providing testimony to an ASADA investigation which never had evidence of their supposed guilt.

Crameri is the ultimate victim of the Essendon ASADA scandal, denied a premiership after crossing to the Western Bulldogs when he was banned along with his 33 former teammates for the 2016 AFL season.

While Jobe Watson was forced to hand back his 2012 Brownlow Medal, Crameri would have been a walk-up start in the Dogs’ flag outfit that won a drought-breaking premiership.

Stewart Crameri was one of the victims of the Essendon drugs saga.

He told the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast players never doubted their innocence but were told by the club they should agree to interviews with Australia’s anti-doping body, ASADA.

Essendon chairman Paul Little claimed in an unearthed recording that AFL boss Gillon McLachlan told him: “There is a 99 per cent chance that the players won’t be charged”.

They complied with requests to speak to investigators as part of Essendon’s self-reporting over the administering of supplements, but were never found with any banned substances in their bodies.

NRL players refused interviews over similar accusations and ultimately accepted backdated 12-month bans which saw him missing only the last few months of the 2014 season.

Essendon’s players were charged then cleared by ASADA but a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling saw them suspended for a season on January 12, 2016.

“I am thinking, ‘Are we in trouble here or what’s going on,’” Crameri said of the day Essendon self-reported.

“And the players still didn’t know if we were in trouble or not. And we’re getting people to tell us that we’re not in trouble, it’s not our fault, and we’re okay. So you go, okay, that’s fine.

“We were told that through the investigation and that probably helped (ASADA) in the fact that we were pretty blase about it and then they pretty much set us up to then tell them information to get us on a technicality.

“They said we have nothing to worry about, you haven’t done the wrong thing. And then someone all of a sudden said, ‘Oh no you did, it’s a technicality. You are guilty and you are going to have 12 months off because we need someone to blame.’”

The Essendon 34 missed the entire 2016 season. Picture: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

Some Essendon players refused the peptide program and others were not interviewed, although a decade on there is still confusion about how and why those 34 players were the ones banned.

The Court of Arbitration was satisfied the players had all taken at least one injection Thymosin Beta-4 and relied on evidence that one player told ASADA the club wanted the injection program confidential and signed consent forms over the injection of substances.

Asked if the players should have refused to be interviewed, Crameri replied: “Pretty much. Is that mistrust? I am not sure. We have got a lot of staff in our businesses (Crameri’s Mitre 10) and I would hate to think I would do the wrong thing by my staff and then blame them.

“(As in) I will let them go and mislead them into doing something. As you get older and you look back you think for a early-20s player to be manipulated like that, it’s a hard thing. Who is responsible for it?”

He says Jobe Watson’s admission that players took peptide AOD-9604 was because Essendon players had been told it was a legal substance.

“We were innocent and Jobe doesn’t go out there saying that if he doesn’t think he’s innocent. So that’s exactly where I think they set us up to say more than we should have.”

After their CAS ban Crameri and Brent Prismall, then both at the Dogs, considered an appeal with Bulldogs president Peter Gordon adamant the bans were not supported by evidence.

“This CAS Judgement contains factual errors, unsupported propositions of law, it applies findings that may be pertinent to one player and extrapolates it to all the other 33 players, often with no basis at all,” Gordon said before an appeal was shelved.

Crameri says any suggestion the players knew they were being injected with performance enhancing drugs is laughable.

“I was 23 or 24 and I will tell you what, we didn’t blink an eye. It was just part of the training regime and we wanted to try to get the best out of ourselves. So we believed in what they were telling us and we said, ‘Yes, we will do that’.

“These things happen in clubs all the time where you might sign a waiver for someone doing a study for a university course and you do a sleep study so you have to sign off some paperwork. You sign that paperwork and you go, yep, no worries. And you go onto training, you think about something else and the program itself, it just happened and we just went on with our day.

“It’s a connection the same as you have with a sports scientist or the high performance guy at the club, so it wasn’t any unusual to anyone else.”

Originally published as SACKED: Stewart Crameri opens up on ASADA’s investigation into the Bombers’ drug saga