Essendon drugs saga: How Stephen Dank ran the controversial supplement program

HE wanted to revolutionise footy. Instead, Stephen Dank’s work at Essendon in 2012 left the club in crisis. This is what went on during his controversial stint at the Bombers.

Stephen Dank arrives for the announcement by Justice Middleton to deliver his judgment on the Essendon supplements saga in the Federal Court in Melbourne on Friday 19th September, 2014. Picture: Mark Dadswell

THE fridge in Stephen Dank’s office at Windy Hill wasn’t stocked with typical supplies.

Bottled water and sandwiches? No.

This was Essendon FC in 2012.

Peptides were on the menu.

The man they call “Danksy” stored hexarelin and other potions in this fridge, which he left unlocked in his disorderly office deep inside Bombers’ HQ.

The office doubled as a makeshift medical centre — it was here that Dank allegedly injected supplements into Essendon players and staff, including the club’s AFL legend coach James Hird.

Dank was not a qualified doctor. He wasn’t a pharmacist. He wasn’t even an accredited sports scientist, although he’d had years of experience working at professional sporting clubs.

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Yet he was the man Essendon’s leaders had recruited to give their players, young men, the scientific edge they hoped might win them the flag.

As Essendon’s official sports scientist, Dank was a key part of their fitness team alongside high performance coach Dean “the Weapon” Robinson.

The pair had worked together previously, at The Gold Coast Suns, before moving south. Robinson, brought to the Bombers by Mark Thompson, had recommended his close, trusted friend Dank for the role.

So together, Dank and Robinson oversaw a regimen of jabs, pills, creams and intravenous drips that plunged the club — and the AFL — into the biggest doping crisis in the history of Australian sport.

Exactly who within the Bombers knew what about the controversial supplement program will be disputed for years to come.

And whether the club’s rampant, poorly regulated injection schedule amounted to doping will be decided in three days, when the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal hands down its verdict.

No matter the tribunal outcome, one thing is clear: the program was way out of line and possibly even harmful to players.

Former high performance coach Dean 'The Weapon' Robinson.

IT ALL started around September 2011, when Dank and Robinson met James Hird at his Toorak mansion for a chat about how they could “turn the club around” using cutting edge sports science.

Robinson’s recollection of that meeting — which Hird strongly disputes — was that Hird had declared he and Dank were now in the club’s “inner sanctum” and the coach wanted the pair to transform the players.

“He wanted me to bring bigger and stronger players to him,” Robinson told the Seven Network.

Robinson, the square-jawed fitness expert who had advised a long list of AFL and NRL teams, then made the unbelievable claim that Hird had suggested he and Dank should run a “black ops” supplement program.

Regardless of whether that is true (and there is a good chance it’s not given Hird’s denials) the evidence suggests Dank and Robinson enthusiastically embraced the idea of a secret supplement regimen.

The pair discussed concealing the specific peptides they were giving players and even made those players sign confidentiality forms.

In October 2011, Robinson texted Dank about a substance that is explicitly banned for use by athletes, a bodybuilding peptide called CJC-1295.

“Can we just call them amino acids? Or something of the kind?” Robinson wrote.

Dank replied: “Yes, that is all they are, an amino acid blend … Leave peptides out.”

Some players, and even Hird himself, recall being told they were receiving simple “amino acids”. Full stop.

Even club doctor Bruce “Doc” Reid was made to accept that scant description in the early weeks of this new supplement regimen.

The veteran medic, a much-loved fixture of the club, was considered yesterday’s man by those pushing this new science.

He wasn’t consulted when players’ blood samples were allegedly sent interstate to check for the WADA-banned substance Insulin Growth Factor 1 in November 2011.

Just why a secret test for a banned substance would even be carried out raised a big red flag for anti-doping investigators and presumably would have done the same had Reid been aware.

But that wasn’t all. The next month, Dank was placing orders for a long list of peptides.

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Essendon coach James Hird with long-serving club doctor, Dr Bruce Reid. Pic: Michael Klein

BY JANUARY 2012, Reid was very worried.

A club veteran, he had never seen anything like it and he was in the dark on too many important details.

When he heard players had been injected — without his knowledge — with a relatively unknown anti-obesity drug called AOD-9604, he hit the roof.

As far as he knew, the players had been getting vitamins and amino acids only.

“If we are resorting to deliver this altered growth hormone molecule, I think we are playing at the edge and this will read extremely badly in the press for our club … I have trouble with these drugs,” he wrote in letter to Hird and Essendon’s then football manager Paul Hamilton on January 17.

He went on to slam as “ludicrous” the use of calf’s blood as a recovery agent, saying it was based on “flimsy evidence”.

“I am sure Steve Dank believes that what we are doing is totally ethical and legal, however, one wonders whether if you take a long stance and look at this from a distance, whether you would want your children being injected with a derivative hormone that is not free to the community.”

But Doc Reid wasn’t the only Essendon health professional suspicious of the program.

When Robinson presented Hird with a copy of an academic paper co-authored by Dank about a supplement called Lactaway, the club dietitian took issue with it almost instantly.

Benita Lalor doubted whether the substance was effective and cautioned that it might even cause muscle damage.

An obviously frustrated Hird emailed a colleague: “This is what we are dealing with.”

For all his zeal, Hird did show restraint, issuing an email saying the program should not harm players and should comply with anti-doping rules.

But, according to Ziggy Switkowski’s review of the program, there was no real follow-up or monitoring to check these ground rules were ever followed.

Along the way, there were plenty of signs things were heading down a potentially dangerous path.

Hird suffered side effects after injecting himself with the Melanotan II allegedly given to him by Robinson. That was early in the piece — as far back as October 2011.

Hird had allegedly received vitamin injections and tablets — likely ephedrine and propanol — himself.

Even Reid, the author of that explosive letter, was present when players later received the very treatments he had criticised.

The supplement AOD9604, a modified form of amino acids.

IN FEBRUARY 2012, 38 players signed consent forms explaining to them what substances they would receive and instructing them to keep it all on the low-down.

According to the season-long supplement schedule, they were to receive an extraordinary 1500 jabs of AOD-9604 and a substance described on the forms only as “thymosin”.

On top of that, they would get 16,500 doses of colostrum and 8000 doses of tribulus.

But the drug-fest didn’t end there. At least one player was given TA65, an anti-ageing tablet obtained from a clinician in South Yarra.

By March, players were being injected offsite — over the road, across town and eventually interstate.

Across the road from Windy Hill was a clinic called Skinovate, then run by a cosmetic doctor named Paul Spano.

There, drips — which had not been approved by Reid — were loaded with vitamin C and B were jammed into the veins of the players.

In all, Skinovate allegedly billed 155 IV treatments to the Bombers.

None of this amounted to doping, of course, and Dank and Hird spoke about it freely by text.

“All IV and injections completed,” wrote Dank.

Hird replied: “Great work mate, it would be a great effort to have them feeling fresh for Anzac Day.”

During a team trip to Queensland, a few players were taken to a clinic in the Gold Coast hinterland and given vitamin B and Actovegin. Reid was there.

In April, players and staff visited a chiropractor named Mal Hooper at his clinic, Hypermed, in South Yarra. There, they received 112 “amino acids” injections and 32 jabs of cerebrolysin, an anti-Alzheimers drug.

They also allegedly got injected with the mystery amino acid borrowed from a muscular dystrophy patient who got it in some pharmacy in Mexico.

All these off-site injections had the bespectacled Reid very concerned. By May, Dank had been told to stop.

But for three more months, until early August, the jabs continued.

By now, there was evidence Dank was trying new types of supplements.

Coach James Hird with Danny Corcoran, Dr Bruce Reid and then Assistant Coach Simon Goodwin in 2013.

WHEN a wave of soft tissue injuries struck the club, Hird asked his sports scientist for clues.

In April, he texted Dank: “Why do you reckon we are getting all the injuries?”

Dank said: “I need to use much more placental cells and Actovegin ... West Coast, Hawthorn and Collingwood’s tissues are biologically advanced. We need to change our biology for a little while.”

A text exchange shows that around this time, Dank had turned to a Melbourne pharmacist for help with the team’s soft tissue injuries.

The pharmacist suggests trying a new mixture, to which Dank replies: “Perfect, let’s get going. Have we tried it on anyone yet?”

Pharmacist: “Few dental injections for periodontal sockets but not for sporting.”

Dank: “Let us test a couple of players.”

It seemed Dank saw the whole thing as one big experiment in which these young players were used as guinea pigs.

When Dank moved to AFL from NRL, he told a former colleague he’d intended to “revolutionise” Australian Football.

He’d talk about which NRL players he thought he could turn into AFL stars, or in his words “prototypes”.

Dank had co-authored a number of academic papers. An academic colleague remembers his eccentric manner, his bad suits and his thirst for scientific knowledge.

“His academic credentials were a bit vague but what he does demonstrate is a real intellect and capacity for knowledge in different areas,” the colleague told the Herald Sun.

There is no suggestion any of this was malicious. In fact one source likened Dank’s activities to the man who created the nuclear bomb — he was so consumed by the science he perhaps failed to stop and think about the ethics.

Ben McDevitt, CEO of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority.

ALL UP, ASADA identified 75 different substances as relevant to their Operation Cobia probe into possible doping in the NRL and AFL.

Most of the substances known to have been used at Essendon were not banned under anti-doping rules.

But there were others — like the mysterious Mexican concoction and the abbreviated “thymosin” on the consent forms — that still have everyone guessing.

Then there is the gear, like hexarelin, that doping investigators suspect may have been used on players, but cannot prove.

If Essendon is next week found to have committed doping violations, it will be because ASADA was able to persuade the tribunal the “thymosin” on the consent form was a reference to Thymosin beta 4 — a WADA-banned type of the drug commonly used on horses.