Sacked Podcast: Guy McKenna explains how Gold Coast dodged an Essendon-style ASADA bullet

Dean Robinson and Stephen Dank were only employed by the Gold Coast Suns for a short period of time. But Guy McKenna spotted some serious red flags. He reveals how the Suns avoided an Essendon-style disaster.

Guy McKenna’s dramatic intervention saw Gold Coast narrowly dodge a similar ASADA bullet to the drugs drama that almost destroyed Essendon.

The sacked Suns coach has revealed how he constantly butted heads with the club’s then strength and conditioning coach Dean Robinson — and Stephen Dank who was briefly employed by the Suns — and was never comfortable with what he called the “guru-ism” applied by some sports science operators.

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Robinson and Dank would later reunite at Essendon and would oversee the club’s ill-fated 2012 sports supplements program which rocked the game’s foundations, cost the Bombers millions of dollars, saw 34 players banned by WADA for a year, and tarnished James Hird’s coaching legacy.

“We never hit it off from the start, Robbo and I,” McKenna told the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast series.

Robinson had been recruited to Gold Coast from Geelong, where he had been a part of two premierships, but his methods did not sit well with the Suns’ inaugural coach, who warned him on two occasions that anything the players took needed to have a “green tick”.

Guy McKenna wasn’t impressed by the guru-ism of some fitness experts. Picture: Luke Marsden

Dank also worked for three months with the Suns — November 2010 to February 2011 — but was quickly shown the door after some troubling internal warning signs.

“We brought him (Robinson) on obviously because of his record down at Geelong,” McKenna said. “That was a fairly short term of employment up on the Gold Coast because there were certain conversations held with me …”

“My simple response (to him) was ‘We are funded by $100 million by the AFL, mate. We can’t be seen to be bending or breaking a rule, so whatever we use with our players, it has to be on the green tick list. Simple’.

Dean Robinson worked at the Suns for a short time under Guy McKenna.

“So we had two conversations around that, and I thought that’s enough, surely an adult would understand that conversation.”

The Suns were later dragged into the Essendon sports supplements probe in 2013 when it emerged Gold Coast defender Nathan Bock was under investigation from the AFL and ASADA after allegations he had been injected with a banned substance to help his recovery from a broken leg.

Bock was later cleared by ASADA due to insufficient evidence.

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Dank had earlier claimed he had provided Robinson with prohibited peptide CJC-1295 from which Bock was taught to self inject.

McKenna stressed he was relieved Gold Coast high performance manager Andrew Weller — now with Cricket Australia — was with the club to provide a “cross check”, but admitted Robinson had “some weird and wonderful ideas that just didn’t (work) for a young group.”

Part of that was working off-site in various physical endeavours, including trampolining, which the players found taxing and rallied against.

Stephen Dank was briefly employed by the Suns. Picture: Luke Marsden

“The great thing about Andrew Weller is that it was all about nuts and bolts,” McKenna said.

“The guru-ism, and all these blokes who live off it (is a worry). I am not saying Robbo did, but there were some blokes out there who were (saying) ‘OK, let’s do this, and let’s do that, and it will have a spike (in performance)’.

“It’s not sustainable because you have to keep coming up with spikes for 22 weeks in a season, and if it’s in a pre-season over 22 weeks, what are we going to do?”

McKenna admitted it was difficult to challenge Robinson at first, given what he had achieved at Geelong, but soon realised his alternate methods were a concern.

“That was the parting of the ways,” he said of Robinson’s exit from the club at the end of 2011, after little more than a year in the job.

Robinson’s exit was explained as a return to Victoria for family reasons, but there was little doubt McKenna had a hand in his departure.

The man known as ‘the Weapon’ ended up at Essendon, and brought Dank into the club, which set in motion one of the most explosive chapters in AFL history.

Originally published as Sacked Podcast: Guy McKenna explains how Gold Coast dodged an Essendon-style ASADA bullet