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So basically once the club doctor & head trainer got wind that the players had taken it upon themselves to look after their own conditioning & food intake (a bloody paleo diet of all things) They shut it down. Call me mad but it looks to me like the club has acted very responsibly & in the player best intrests.
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I hope you're right. After the $ouffS lovefest on 9 last night, I fear Manly are farked.Originally posted by Darkone View PostComment
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God I hope you are right Darky, hopefully they can take a leaf out of the NZ America's Cup team playbook :-)Originally posted by Darkone View PostComment
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manly in the gf would be a dream come true for us? the chance to beat them 5 times in one season would go some way in ridding the stench of fulton from our history!Comment
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thanks uncle nick we love your work!Comment
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The lights are out my friend....Originally posted by Funky Chicken View Post
"Qui audet adipiscitur"
WHO DARES WINSComment
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You are a genius Dark.lol at SouffsOriginally posted by Darkone View PostThe lights are out my friend....Comment
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Turns out the supposed 'organised crime' was just some lol@souffs lowlife with a petty crime of intimidation of a bouncer. Talk about a media beat up...
http://www.news.com.au/sport/nrl/sou...-1226728848135Comment
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I wish they would just let it go. It's getting pathetic now on their behalf.Originally posted by Alan View PostComment
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THE mysterious figure who obtained photographs of blood tests showing elevated hormone levels for three Roosters players is a diehard Rabbitohs fan with a renowned hatred for the Bondi Junction club.
The Daily Telegraph can reveal the photos were downloaded from a mobile phone belonging to the man earlier this year, when he was returning from a holiday in Thailand.
Preliminary media reports claim the phone was linked to organised crime, but records at Sydney’s Downing Centre Court revealed the only police charges against the man related to intimidation of a bouncer outside an Oxford St bar in January 2011.
It’s not certain whether the man has been charged with any other offences, in other jurisdictions.
He is now a significant person of interest in the ASADA probe, along with the former player who accompanied him to Thailand, Ben Darcy.
Darcy is a Roosters junior known to several NRL stars, but is close friends with Sandor Earl, who last month admitted to trafficking and use of peptide CJC-1295.
Darcy was also working for the nutritional and fitness firm, Nubodi, that took the blood tests from the entire Roosters NRL squad last November.
Nubodi owner Sean Carolan sacked Darcy a few months later, after repeatedly warning the 24-year-old against bringing certain friends into the workplace.
Carolan suspects the file containing the blood test results was illegally accessed. He believes the results showing elevated hormone levels for three players - Sam Moa, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Boyd Cordner - were selectively photographed by whoever broke into the file.
Roosters have recieved a visit from ASADA as they prepare for their preliminary final against the Knights.
Repeat tests on the players conducted by the club showed normal results and none have been sent an ASADA interview notice. There is no suggestion that Carolan gave the players drugs of any kind.
Sometime later, the photos made their way onto the mobile phone. They were downloaded by customs when the man returned from their Thailand holiday, which was taken prior to when Darcy opened a Nutrition Station franchise beneath Pitt St Mall in June.
Sources close to Nubodi are unclear about the motive for giving the tests to the man.
One well-placed Roosters insider speculated that his passion for Souths was the reason, given the damaging potential of the material to the club all Souths fans love to hate.
Reports on Thursday suggest the Roosters sacked a sports nutrition company earlier this year after learning six players had returned blood tests with elevated readings for the banned substance Human Growth Hormone.
The man’s Twitter feed is littered with support for the Rabbitohs.
Law enforcement authorities, including the Australian Crime Commission (ACC), have always feared incriminating information could be used to attempt to blackmail players into match-fixing.
There is no evidence to suggest any match-fixing has taken place in the NRL this year or that any of the Roosters players were even approached in this case.Comment
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http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-league/l...#ixzz2g6Yd8TRI
Ruffled Roosters
Date
September 28, 2013
Rick Feneley, Kate McClymont
What was an organised crime figure doing with the blood test results of NRL players in his phone? Rick Feneley and Kate McClymont report on the rugby league season's not-so-grand finale.
It was late March this year when Shane Charter confronted a man going through his rubbish bin. ''We know you have been talking to the media,'' the stranger told Charter. ''Keep your mouth shut or you're dead.''
Charter would soon become know as the biochemist linked to the Essendon AFL club's drugs scandal. He had a lot of secrets, and he was no angel. Charter had already done jail time for importing 100,000 pseudoephedrine tablets in 2004. But now, after this visit to his home, he decided it would be prudent to ''disappear for a while'' with his family to Phuket in Thailand. Days later, his home was burgled. The intruders left the family's pet rabbit, with a broken neck, dead on the doorstep. Then Charter was attacked with an iron bar in Phuket.
This time he decided not to run. Instead, he would turn whistleblower. He would go before the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority to tell all: about the peptides he had imported from China, about drug use by footballers, and about his work with the sports scientist Stephen Dank.
It was another code and another scandal this week, but the headlines rocking the Sydney Roosters - at the climax of a stellar season for the rugby league club - involve some similar themes. Phuket, for starters, is the preferred getaway of two of this saga's lead characters. Dank's name comes up again, if tangentially. And the anti-doping authority ASADA is hot on the case.
As the Herald revealed on Thursday, the Roosters - the minor premiers who might be two games away from grand final glory - admitted they had sacked a sports nutrition company called Nubodi in January after it conducted unauthorised blood tests on its players. Those tests, not exposed until now, indicated six players had elevated readings for the human growth hormone.
In the words of the Roosters prop Martin Kennedy, the levels were ''off the charts'' for some of the Polynesian players. But that, he and others insist, could be explained by their natural levels of the hormone - not illegal injections of synthetic HGH.
It was Kennedy who introduced Nubodi's owner, the sports nutritionist Sean Carolan, to the club. He had been a happy client of Carolan's. Last December, unbeknown to team doctor John Orchard, who was overseas, Carolan was hired to put Roosters players on his detox diet, which features raw food. So pure is the diet, apparently, that it forbids even hot water. Another happy customer, former Herald sports writer Josh Rakic, vouches for its health benefits and thanks Carolan for his remarkable weight loss.
As usual, Carolan ran blood tests on players going on the detox diet. The club, however, insists it did not know he was testing for HGH, and that it dispensed with him when it found out. The Roosters' own follow-up tests on the players showed no abnormal HGH levels, they say.
The former ASADA chief executive and chairman Richard Ings explains that, when testing for natural levels of the human growth hormone, ''it varies by person, by day and by hour. It comes within a broad range. A high reading could be caused by someone taking synthetic HGH. It could also be caused by someone having a natural biology to have a high level of the hormone. It could be caused by testing at a time of day when human growth hormones are peaking. And it could be caused because you are sick.''
So far so good. There could be a perfectly natural explanation for the readings, and Ings says we must give the club and Carolan the benefit of the doubt unless evidence to suggest otherwise emerges.
There is nothing natural, however, about where those blood test readings turned up: on the seized phone of an organised crime figure.
If not for that explosive detail, this scandal may never have gone public. The implications are chilling.
''The serious question,'' says Ings, ''is how did the personal, private medical information of these players go from the people who legitimately collected it to the people who had no business having it? The second question is: why?''
On February 7 this year, without knowing of this particular case, the Australian Crime Commission suggested why. On the so-called ''darkest day for sport'', the commission - backed by the then justice minister Jason Clare - delivered its report on drugs in sport. Professional sports, and not only the football codes, were ''highly vulnerable to organised criminal infiltration'', it warned.
''They are looking for something to use against a player - to muscle the player, blackmail the player, into doing something they wouldn't normally do,'' says Ings. Such as fixing a match.
The underworld figure who obtained the Roosters blood test results has been identified as Khan Alameddine. Nobody, as yet, has publicly joined any dots between the seizure of his phone and the club or any of the figures identified in this story. No links are suggested.
But at the climax of the NRL season, there is scandal enough for the Roosters and the entire game.
While Martin Kennedy was Carolan's mate, so was another
league player, the former Rooster and now Canberra winger Sandor Earl. On Thursday night - the same day the Herald broke the HGH story - Channel Nine's The Footy Show screened a pre-recorded interview with 24-year-old Earl, who is facing a four-year ban from the game for using peptides, and a possible life ban for trafficking in the illegal substances.
Earl has been telling ASADA what he knows, and now he was on television claiming he had been naive, that he had not known he was doing anything wrong. Earl had been playing for the Penrith Panthers in 2011 when, recovering from a double shoulder reconstruction, he was under the care of Dank, the sport scientist. Earl claimed he became a victim of Dank ''abusing power and trust''. Earl admitted taking the banned substance CJC-1295 but alleged Dank assured him that it was not banned and that he could not get into trouble. Earl denied importing substances from Thailand.
Dank immediately replied that he would sue Earl. He has repeatedly denied treating players with or supplying illegal substance, whether to Essendon, the Cronulla Sharks league team or to Earl.
But by the time his interview went to air, Earl was already in Thailand. It is in Phuket that he often catches up with another significant figure in the Roosters controversy, his old schoolmate Ben Darcy. Earl, Darcy and Martin Kennedy all attended Matraville Sports High. Darcy, 24, a former junior player for the Roosters, spends much of his time in Phuket, body-building. Earl attends the Tiger Muay Thai martial arts boot camp.
Last year, Earl and Kennedy recommended that Sean Carolan, at Nubodi, hire Darcy. Carolan agreed but says he sacked him after six months because he was unreliable. The Daily Telegraph on Friday reported that Darcy was pushed out because he had introduced ''certain associates'' to training sessions. It said authorities stopped one of those associates, who was suspected of dealing party and performance-enhancing drugs, on his return to the country from Thailand some months ago. They allegedly found the man in possession of photographs of the Roosters' blood tests.
''This is getting beyond scary,'' says Darren Kane, a sports lawyer and Herald columnist. ''The allegations of prohibited substance use levelled against Australian sport this year are a symptom of a disease - organised crime being the disease.''
Kane advised the Cronulla Sharks after the Crime Commission report. The Sharks were then the only NRL club investigated for systemic doping. Kane stresses it is not possible, on the available evidence, to allege illegal growth hormones were administered to anyone at the Roosters.
''But it raises all sorts of questions when those blood tests - whether they are abnormal or not - end up in the hands of supposed criminal identities.''
The motive? ''There's supply of the substances themselves, I suppose, but the obvious one is the manipulation of outcomes for financial gain. That's where the money is to be made.''
While giving Carolan the benefit of the doubt, he is astounded nobody raised a red flag about his work with peptides. ''In undertaking the due diligence that any sports franchise should undertake before employing anyone who will be front-facing with their main asset, the athletes, it sounds like you could have made a link in five minutes, with a Google search, between the gentleman concerned and his [other] firm, Advanced Peptide Solutions. Now as soon as you get to that point, any reasonable sort of administrator should know that one of the primary classes of substances which are prohibited are peptides - bear in mind not all peptides, but certain classes - and that should have rung alarm bells. Although the administration of peptides to people generally is something which may be allowed, athletes are constrained by much stricter rules, which all professional sports franchises should be very familiar with.''
Ings, the former ASADA chief, goes a little further: ''You should run like hell. Even if they are providing those substances to other clients legitimately, it will bring attention to the club, and ASADA will come down on you. These are multimillion-dollar football clubs, where their reputation and compliance with anti-doping rules are absolutely critical, and if they get them wrong it can bankrupt them. So the duty of care - that they check the bona fides of these people - is vital. But even now, clubs - and not only the Roosters - don't have those procedures, which I find incredible.''
Ings is mostly concerned, though, about that seized phone.
''Criminal elements can ingratiate themselves with players and work out who has weakness for illicit drugs, who has a need for performance-enhancing drugs, who has a need for female company, who likes to gamble. The corrupters will give the players some cocaine, or they'll float them $10,000 with which to gamble. The corrupter doesn't ask for anything in return - until they're ready. Then they might say, 'There's a match this weekend. Who's going to get on the field? Who's injured?' That's all valuable betting information. Later they might ask, 'I want you to give away a penalty under the goal post in the first five minutes.'
''The corrupters have all the leverage: they know the player bought illicit drugs; they know the player bought performance-enhancing drugs; they know the player is $30,000 in debt to a bookmaker.''
The Bulldogs' Ryan Tandy was fined $4000 and expelled from the game for rigging a bet on the North Queensland Cowboys scoring first with a penalty kick against his team in 2010. A magistrate, however, threw out the case against John Elias, former Parramatta player Brad Murray, and Jai Ayoub, the son of Murray's manager Sam Ayoub, who had been accused of joining a betting plunge on the Cowboys' penalty kick. As it turned out, the Cowboys took the tap instead of the penalty kick and the rigged bet didn't pay off.
The motto at Matraville Sports High is ''endeavour''. Old boys Martin Kennedy, Sandor Earl and Ben Darcy have certainly had a go since leaving school. It emerged on Friday that Darcy was the Australian fitness trainer, until now unnamed, who in 2011 was arrested at Munich airport with 36 live pythons in his luggage. Coincidentally, Marty Kennedy is the co-owner of the Snake Ranch on the central coast but says he did not supply those pythons to Darcy.Comment
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