The Essendon Football Club supplements controversy (commonly known as the Essendon supplements saga) is a sports controversy which began in late 2011. The Essendon Football Club, a professional Australian rules football club playing in the Australian Football League (AFL), was investigated starting in February 2013 by the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) over the legality of its supplements program during the 2012 AFL season and the preceding preseason.
The initial stages of the investigation in 2013 made no findings regarding the legality of the supplements program. Still, they highlighted a wide range of governance and duty-of-care failures relating to the program. In August 2013, the AFL fined Essendon $2 million, barred the club from the 2013 finals series, and suspended senior coach James Hird and general manager Danny Corcoran as a result of these findings.
After four years of investigations and legal proceedings the AFL and ASADA reported in November 2014 multiple anti-doping rule violations against 34 current and former players of the Essendon Football Club for the use of prohibited substance Thymosin Beta-4 and their involvement in prohibited methods.
Following assessment of the evidence the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal is comfortably satisfied that TB4 was a prohibited substance under the AFL Code at the relevant time. However the Tribunal is not comfortably satisfied that each player was injected with TB4. As a result the Tribunal is not comfortably satisfied that any Athlete had violated clause 11.2 of the AFL Anti-Doping Code.
Therefore the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal decides on 31 March 2015 to dismiss the ASADA reports about multiple anti-doping violations committed by the player of the Australian Essendon Football Club for the administration and use of the prohibited substance Thymosin Beta-4.
