The Essendon supplements case continues to make headlines following allegations that Stephen Dank, the former Sport Scientist for the Australian Football League (AFL) club Essendon, admitted to a journalist that he had trafficked prohibited substance CJC-1295 to another former employer, AFL club the Gold Coast Suns.

Earlier today the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) issued a statement saying that its investigation unit would assess these new claims which it says are ‘starkly at odds’ with Dank’s ‘previous position on the matter’. According to ASADA, Dank is in fact currently appealing the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal’s finding that he had even attempted to traffic CJC-1295 to the Gold Coast Suns.

On 9 April 2016, ASADA responded to widespread media allegations of hypocricy by defending its decision to clear former Gold Coast Suns player Nathan Bock of doping, over five years after he was accused of injecting himself with the banned peptide CJC-1295.

In a statement, ASADA said that the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal ‘was not comfortably satisfied that Mr Dank had trafficked CJC-1295 to the Gold Coast in 2010’, despite being ‘comfortably satisfied’ that Dank had in fact attempted to do so.

As a result ASADA chose not to appeal the Tribunal’s findings, citing ‘insufficient supporting evidence’. However in light of the new allegations, ASADA will now assess its position.

In June 2015 the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal issued Stephen Dank with a lifetime ban, after he was found guilty of ten breaches of its Anti-Doping Code. Stephen Dank worked as a Sports Scientist for Manly Warringah in the National Rugby League (NRL), before joining AFL club Gold Coast Suns briefly in 2010. He did some consulting work for NRL sides Penrith Panthers and Cronulla Sharks in 2011 before finally joining Essendon as a Sports Scientist later that year.

On 11 January 2016, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) appeal against the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal decision to clear 34 Essendon players of breaching AFL Anti-Doping rules.

According to Australian newspaper The Age, Dank is launching ‘an unfair dismissal case against the Gold Coast Suns’ after never being ‘given any reason as to why he had been sacked’.