Anatomy of an Olympic disaster: A timeline of Tom Craig’s troublesome Tuesday nights on the streets of Paris
As a Hockey Australia family-and-friends function broke up on Tuesday night, Kookaburras striker Tom Craig went looking for trouble. A timeline of the events that followed.
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As a Hockey Australia family-and-friends function broke up at the Hotel Maison in Montmartre on Tuesday night, Kookaburras striker Tom Craig went looking for trouble.
As the official function broke up at about 7.30pm, his glamorous partner Alice Arnott was already tucked in bed after an exhausting but successful Hockeyroos debut campaign.
A handful of his teammates headed downstairs for dinner with team officials.
But Lane Cove lawyer Craig and a collection of teammates joined the many Australian athletes cashing in on their 48 hours of freedom under AOC guidelines.
Those athletes were told they officially had 48 hours in the village before moving on, with Craig’s next step a stint playing hockey in a German professional league.
The entire collection of Kookaburras and Hockeyroos players and support staff took part in a group photo celebrating their campaign.
Both had suffered nightmare quarter-final defeats but the Hockeyroos girls had worked hard to restore a tight, cohesive culture after a 2021 internal review detailing bullying allegations.
And the Kookaburras had been beaten by a better side in the Netherlands despite entering their tournament as Tokyo silver medallists.
Not for nothing was Hockey Australia CEO David Pryles about to post on social media on Wednesday morning his pride in an “incredible group of athletes”, stating “with the right people, culture and values, you can accomplish great things.”
Little did hockey officials know that by that stage Craig was already in custody in a French police station after being arrested for attempting to buy a gram of cocaine.
He had been photographed slumped up against a wall in a Paris street seemingly with hands cuffed behind his back after trying to flee police, with that image later to be distributed on Twitter.
Craig was arrested around midnight on Tuesday night, with the “commotion” as he attempted to flee those police bringing the attention of his teammates.
It wasn’t great timing _ you can hardly walk down any Paris street right now without bumping into half a dozen policemen.
As AOC chef de mission and Hockey Australia’s high performance boss Bernard Savage detailed later, those teammates had followed him to the police station.
As Savage said: “It is our understanding that Tom was acting alone and the only events that brought it to the players attention was him indeed being arrested. After that arrest a small group of players did follow Tom to the police station concerned for his well being.”
They hoped he might be quickly released, with French laws allowing for on the spot fines of as little as $250 to be paid for perpetrators to be released without conviction.
Instead, as the Paris Public Prosecutors said, the investigations were left to the Narcotics Squad.
Hockey officials said Craig was treated well while in custody but finally emerged at about 6pm Paris time, 18 hours later.
After high-level negotiations he had been handed a “probationary criminal warning for drug use” but also dishevelled, tired, hungry and stressed, in the words of Savage.
To the credit of the Australian Olympic Committee, he made a short statement for cameras which had waited six hours before being released into the hands of his family, excommunicated from the athletes village.
As Australian chef de mission Anna Meares said: “He has apologised, shown remorse, and he has owned up to his mistake, and we will support him if he needs help”.
Whether or not he was taking that single gram of cocaine for himself or to share with teammates is largely irrelevant.
Any Australian under 30 years of age would shrug their shoulders at the concept of someone out on the town trying to find a gram of cocaine to kick off the night, which by all accounts costs around $450-$480 in Australia.
But it is the reputational damage for Hockey Australia and the timing which only fuels the athletes-behaving-badly narrative.
The Kookaburras have only just secured a major sponsor again and have two years until another major competition in the 2024 World Cup.
They only have a few chances each Olympic cycle to showcase their skills, profile and athleticism as a team that trains from 6am until 9am, works or studies all day and then trains again.
Instead they depart France having missed the medal rounds, with the popular Craig having had his Paris misbehaviour splashed on the front pages of the nation’s newspaper.
On a day when Australia won four gold medals it was a spectacular own goal in timing and conduct and one Craig will take some time to live down.
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