Hird lawyer in poke at Suns

JAMES Hird’s lawyer has accused the AFL of “blatant double standards” over Stephen Dank’s employment at the Gold Coast Suns.

The Australian Sports AntiDoping Authority ( ASADA) announced yesterday it would not appeal against the AFL anti- doping tribunal’s decision to clear 34 current and former Essendon players, or its findings related to biochemist Stephen Dank.

It leaves the World AntiDoping Agency ( WADA) as the only body in a position to fight the verdicts, with three weeks to make a decision.

Dank was found guilty of attempting to traffick the banned peptide CJC- 1295 to the AFL expansion club by the league’s anti- doping tribunal on Friday.

A separate charge of “assisting, encouraging, aiding, abetting, covering up ... delivering and/ or distributing to a third party or parties, namely the Gold Coast Suns Football Club and support persons of the club in a prohibited substance, namely CJC- 1295, in December 2010” was also upheld by the AFL tribunal.

Hird’s solicitor, Steven Amendola, said it was bewildering the AFL had never properly investigated the Suns for governance breaches.

Essendon was fined $ 2 million, stripped of draft picks and booted from the 2013 finals by the AFL for governance failings over its 2012 supplements program run by Dank.

“It seems that unless it involves a black jumper with a red sash across it, the AFL is not particularly concerned with governance arrangements at clubs,” Amendola said yesterday.

But an AFL spokesperson last night said: “There has been no punishment for the Gold Coast Suns because there were no governance breaches and there was no program of injections undertaken at the Suns.

“The charges related to an event outside the club which ASADA has investigated.”