With so much happening this month in the way of sporting scandal, it was hard to pick one standout performance.
Benny Barba may have been the obvious choice, but with no real specific behavioural incident in the month of February – apart from hooking himself off the paddock during a trial game – he missed the Guildford on a pure technicality.
The ‘Blade Runner’ also certainly put his foot in the ring, but the very notion of giving out an award for murder, unless it was to Robert Mugabe or some other homicidal dictator (which would have been cool), leaves a bitter taste in the judging panel’s mouths which has nothing to do with the usual tang associated with alcoholism.
So who deserves this month’s award for outrageous off-field behaviour? Well in a Guildford first, the February 2013 Guildford Award goes to an entity rather than an individual. The Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, to be specific.
The ‘Drugs in Sport’ scandal unexpectedly broke this month like the Virgin Mary’s water, spewing a pious flow of ink all through our papers and calling for the heads of these “cheats” and “scumbags” to be put out on public display and torn apart medieval-style by the ravenous crows of the media.
“WE DON’T NEED EVIDENCE! WE NEED NAMES!” the public and politicians cried as they gathered their pitchforks, set fire to their brooms and took to the streets. Every player in the NRL suddenly had a cloud hanging over them and for once it actually seemed unwarranted – no one had been gang-raped and no one had even tested positive for fuck’s sake!
So as Sarah Palin look-a-like Kate Lundy hitched up her skirt and took a huge crap on professional sport in general, while her cronies wrung their hands in the background like the winged monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, we all desperately craned our necks to see what she had hiding up there.
“Oops!” She squeaked as she pulled up her bloomers, “I can’t show you that! I’m just here to implicate a few clubs, waltz around in the limelight for a while and enjoy my 15 minutes of fame.”
Thus she scurried away, hugging her clipboard with a cheeky smirk, and returned to the shadows where all politicians reside, desperately clinging on to the last few frayed puppet strings that haven’t been yanked away by big business.
Mud sticks, but shit stinks Kate. You should know this, you work in Canberra.
Now, as I write this, the sharks are circling Cronulla – and I don’t mean in their utes in the car-park.
The general consensus is that they are guilty of taking substances in 2011 that were not banned when they took them – let me repeat that – were not banned when they took them. So what’s the beef? They have done nothing wrong! They were ahead of the game, and it seems when the substances became banned they stopped taking them.
Now I don’t like the Shire as much as the Dark Lord of Mordor, but it is likely this is true of the Essendon Bombers as well. So are we going put two of Australia’s biggest sports organisations on the brink of destruction for not actually doing anything wrong, but just being a bit cheeky and looking for a legal edge?
NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell has called for common sense to prevail, but common sense has simply not been present since that fateful day when all NRL CEOs were called together for what was little more than a big show, with a bunch of finger pointing and an excuse for the ASADA to get their faces on television.
My advice to Lundy and her monkeys? Go take your Guildford and concentrate your energies on catching actual drug cheats, and providing some actual evidence before naming them to all and sundry.
And stop taking Long Drops in public.
By Al McClintock