It is a great injustice Jobe Watson handed back his 2012 Brownlow Medal, writes Mark Robinson
JOBE Watson surrendered his 2012 Brownlow Medal without real proof he played a single game that season with a performance-enhancing drug in his body. That’s not right, Mark Robinson writes.
Mark Robinson
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THE greatest debacle in AFL history culminated on Friday with one of the greatest injustices.
Jobe Watson surrendered his 2012 Brownlow Medal without real proof he played a single game that season with a performance-enhancing drug in his body.
That’s not right. It’s not even close to being right.
Give me positive tests, give me substantial truth, give me hard evidence.
Don’t give me strands and cables manipulated into evidence by a bunch of lawyers.
Don’t give me two diagonally opposed results at two separate anti-doping bodies — the AFL’s and then WADA’s, both presided over by honourable men — and then have us believe one is more right than the other.
There is doubt here.
WADA’s burden of proof was a flimsy “comfortable satisfaction’’.
How about comfortable doubt.
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JOBE WATSON: BOMBER HANDS BACK HIS 2012 BROWNLOW MEDAL
WATSON’S STATEMENT: READ IT IN FULL
ESSENDON’S STATEMENT: BOMBERS ‘UNRESERVEDLY APOLOGISE’ TO WATSON
Yet, Watson is a now a disgraced Brownlow medallist, a cheat, a liar, a fraud and a man to be thrown in with Ben Johnson and Lance Armstrong and all those Chinese chicks with Hulk Hogan shoulders, because a group of people was only comfortably satisfied.
Imagine that: Being pinged for life as a drug cheat — and losing the most prestigious award in the AFL because of it — on the burden of comfortable satisfaction.
Sorry, I need greater proof if I’m going to hang him.
Who knows what happened at Essendon in 2012, and until sports scientist Stephen Dank puts a hand on the Bible and his right hand in the air, then we’ll never know.
In the end, Watson had no alternative other than to hand the medal back to the AFL.
He is a man of substance, Watson — and not a drug cheat as the hysterically minded try to have you believe — and on Friday he put the integrity of the game ahead of his personal belief.
He didn’t want to hand it back because he believes he didn’t do anything wrong. But he did.
In doing so, he saved the AFL from announcing the most difficult of decisions on Tuesday, that he would be stripped of the medal.
Even at the end, Watson was thinking of others.
That sounds wholly almighty of him, but the fact is he let the AFL off the hook.
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The AFL, meanwhile, wouldn’t have been comfortable asking for the medal back. Remember, they pleaded with ASADA and WADA and at the CAS hearing that the players escape penalty because, they believed, the players didn’t do anything wrong
It must have been a wretched decision for Watson to wrestle with.
Keep it and fight on principle and then force the AFL to strip it from him at a Commission meeting on Tuesday. Or honour the game, and its history, ahead of honouring himself.
“The basic principle behind this prestigious award is to honour the fairest and best. If there is a question in peoples minds as to whether the award is tainted, the fairest and best thing to do is to give it back and honour the history that has gone before me,’’ Watson said on Friday.
This was a decision largely of his own making.
He did not seek wide counsel and only informed his father, Tim, of his decision on Friday morning.
People will shoot him down, but reckon Watson put the game ahead of himself.. He's a class act, that man. @superfooty
— Mark Robinson (@Robbo_heraldsun) November 11, 2016
It wasn’t a grand announcement either. Tim, a champion of the game himself, got a text message from his son, informing him of the news and the protocols henceforth.
Jobe released the news via a statement from his management group.
Tim did not want to comment on Friday, but the understanding from within the family is one of relief that it’s finally over.
It’s not lost on his family, either, that Jobe took matters into his own hands.
There will be some observers who will look less favourably on Watson, and think equal runners-up Sam Mitchell and Trent Cotchin were robbed of their rightful positions as Brownlow medallists.
Now that Watson is gone, Mitchell and Cotchin deserve that recognition.
The AFL can’t leave 2012 as an asterisk or a gap year.
Because if they do, it would signal they are not fully committed to the belief Watson has lost his claim on it.
If that’s the case, why can’t the Commission hand it back to Watson on Tuesday?
Who knows. In this crazy, frenzied, drawn-out four-year saga, maybe they will.
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