There are some golden rules to crisis management. Take responsibility. Be proactive, transparent and accountable. Get ahead of the story. Maybe the memo hasn't reached Australia's leading sports governing bodies as they lurch from one PR disaster to another.
Over the past few years crisis of sporting governance have dogged Australian sport. The latest storm is engulfing Australian swimming in the wake of Shayna Jack's positive drugs test and provisional suspension from ASADA, and it has exposed the inadequacies of many of our sporting bodies swimming against the tide, as it were. It's also shone a light on how we as a nation react to doping and cheating controversies here and overseas. And it's left many in Australia clinging onto the moral high ground by their fingernails.
Let's look at the timeline of events from a tumultuous week in Gwangju. Sunday 21st July, Olympic champion Mack Horton took silver behind Sun Yang, who served a doping suspension in 2014, and has been the subject of a current investigation after allegedly defying testers by smashing a vial of his own blood with a hammer. Horton protested the continued participation of Yang by refusing the share the podium with him after the race. Horton's strong stance was lauded by many, although not by FINA the world governing body, who served him with an official warning.
In amongst the praise, some suggestion of hypocrisy, with Horton seemingly content to be in the same team as Thomas Fraser-Holmes, an Australian who served a doping suspension for missing three tests in 2017.
A few days later Britain's Duncan Scott does the same, and received a mouthful of abuse from an agitated Yang, as more swimmers came out in support of these anti-doping protests. While all this happened, no one was looking at an Instagram post on July 14th, from 20 year-old squad member Shayna Jack. That was soon to change.
In the post Jack announced her withdrawal from the Worlds due to "personal reasons". There was no reaction from Swimming Australia on their website or socials. In fact just two days prior head coach Jacco Verhaeren painted a rosy picture. "We are looking good; everyone is healthy and there are no injuries so that is always important."
Those quotes were posted on July 12.
Then on Saturday night all hell broke loose. With newspapers about to break the story, Jack was forced to reveal that she withdrew due to a positive drugs test, with the muscle builder Ligandrol found in her sample. A result Swimming Australia (SA) became aware of on July 12. After a week of silence over Horton's stance, SA finally had to act, with CEO Leigh Russell putting out a statement: "As you would expect we are bitterly disappointed with allegations a swimmer has a prohibited substance in her system although it is important to point out that the matter is yet to be determined."
This was followed by a media briefing on Sunday that saw the embattled CEO suggest SA were waiting on the results of the B-sample, they were bound by a confidentiality agreement with ASADA, and that Jack herself was going to reveal the A-sample result at the conclusion of the championship.
But later in the day things got even worse with Jack posting a long, heartfelt statement on her Instagram confirming that her B sample was also positive -- a fact ascertained on July 19 -- and denying any deliberate wrongdoing. The post was labelled 'The Truth & Nothing but the Truth'. It was the third post from Jack in two weeks explaining her mysterious absence. We were finally getting a little closer to the truth.
The B sample result saw Jack's worst fears realised, ruling the 20-year-old out of competition for up to four years, unless she can prove that the anti-doping violation was unintentional.
In a week where Australia's most high profile swimming star took a laudable stand against doping, the governing body, that was acutely aware of the issues with Jack even as Horton stood on the pool deck, remained silent, only daring to speak once the news was winging its way around the globe. Even then the message was muddled.
Responsibility. Transparency. Accountability, remember.
It's true that ASADA directives appear to indicate that at this stage only the athlete could make the news public. But that failed to happen until it was too late. A strategy of genuine, contrite honesty, jointly managed by the athlete and the governing body, following the initial positive result and we would be looking at a very different situation. Instead, senior member of the team Cate Campbell had to front a media pack desperate for answers on Saturday night, as SA officials were nowhere to be found, despite the governing body being fully armed with the facts for a fortnight, and suggestions that head coach Verhaeren was prepared to talk to the press.
Swimming Australia's handling of the matter is the latest in a long line of sporting fiascos often of a governing body's making. Earlier this year Football Federation Australia removed Matildas coach Alen Stajcic from his position, and refused to give any firm reasons for the decision. Six months later, a board member had to publicly apologise to the coach for falsely slandering him on social media. The World Cup campaign fell apart, and no one is really any closer to knowing why Stajcic was jettisoned.
There are plenty more examples to be found, from the mishandling of the Israel Folau contract situation by Rugby Australia, the AFL's mea culpa after the Adam Goodes saga and the eternal controversy over their illicit drugs policy, and the initial misinformation provided in Cape Town as 'Sandpapergate' hit the Australian cricket team, and plunged the sport into a full blown governance crisis.
Too often leadership appears to be judged on the perception of a sport. If we say everything is fine, people will believe it. Spin, spin, spin. Image is everything. But history shows that you can only hide the truth for so long.
It's also a week that has brought Australia's relationship with sporting morality into acute focus. Many Australians are are brought up to believe that to be the best at anything, you have to work harder than your opponent. There are no short-cuts. Our champions are men and women who have taken natural gifts and worked their butt off to be the best in the world. We seem to believe that only those nations with inferior ethical standards look for illegal ways to be the best. We put our champions on a pedestal because we know how hard they have worked to achieve their goals. It is a superiority complex with, arguably, underlying jingoism.
It's apparent in the coverage over the last week. Sun Yang is the pantomime villain. A convicted doper who has launched a thousand think pieces after the "brave Aussie champ" stands up to him. Today, Jack is 'devastated'. The focus is on how she 'has no idea how it got into her system, and would never cheat'. The latest is that she may have been 'preyed on by shady doping facilitators'. This may well prove to be true, but it's a public presumption of innocence we don't afford to many outside of these shores.
Horton, to his continued credit, has spoken out in the wake of the Jack scandal saying: "I was disappointed to learn late yesterday that a fellow Dolphins team member had recently returned a positive A sample."
Jack's career lies in tatters. Both samples are positive and she is guilty of an anti-doping violation. The burden of proof now lies with her and her team to explain how it ended up in her system, and try to justify the cries of innocence. But the prospects do not appear to be good. The onus is on the athlete to be accountable for every substance in their body. It comes with the territory.
The fact is Australian athletes are not immune to a culture of doping. Cycling has suffered more than most sports with several Australians implicated on the road and the track over the last 20 years as the toxic drug culture spared no nation. Olympic medalists have also seen their careers blighted and legacy forever tainted. The Essendon and Cronulla supplements saga showed Australian sport at its very worst, as critics and apologists clashed, and teams were torn apart. On nearly all of these occasions the initial response is denial. It was the supplements. The water. Must have been contaminated. And we believe it, true or not, because why would an Aussie try and cheat?
In an era of marginal gains and one percenters the reality is, we're no different to any other country. Anyone who thinks differently just hasn't been paying attention.