Clean and Gold: Nerves of steel with Jackie Narracott, Paul Narracott and Michael Milton

This episode of our podcast On Side talks to Play the Aussie Way campaign ambassadors, NBL legend Cal Bruton, Ellie Cole, Australia’s most decorated female Paralympian, and young soccer player Harry about the culture shift they hope to lead.

While Playing the Aussie Way means something slightly different to each of them, there are common themes – respect, inclusion, fun and trying your best.

Sixteen-year-old Harry says his enjoyment of sport changed when he took the result out of the equation.

“Last year was the first year I tried just playing for fun and I really felt more connected to the sport and felt more like I wanted to play each week and like I wanted to go to training,” he says. “So I think that's the better way to approach the game.”

Basketball coaches are renowned for histrionics, with Cal even admitting he was at the wrong end of the whistle once. The NBL Hall of Famer, who still has to deal with racism in sport, says “it's always the challenge”.

“I try to live my life to be the best possible person I can be and be a mentor and a leader for all young disadvantaged youth that are looking for an opportunity to be on the right track and grow and sport is a just a tremendous vehicle for that.”

And, while there are still challenges when it comes to racism and discrimination, sport has come a long way.

Ellie says this really hit her at the Tokyo closing ceremony.

“I was wrapping up my entire 17-year Paralympic career and I was surrounded by people who have chosen to be the best version of themselves despite what has happened to them,” she says. “That's exactly what Play the Aussie Way is about. It's about everyone having access to an opportunity like what I had.”

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Hosted by Tim Gavel, in this week’s program we explore life after sport and how hard it is for athletes to find their niche.

We talk to AFL forward Josh Bruce, who retired near the end of the AFL season, 3-time Olympic gold medallist, swimmer, Petria Thomas, and Ben Hardy, an Olympian and former captain of the Australian national volleyball team.

Find out more information at https://www.sportintegrity.gov.au/

Follow our socials:

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Instagram: https://instagram.com/sportintegrityaus?igshid=YzAwZjE1ZTI0Zg==

Produced by Ryan Micallef

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Former Matilda Michelle Heyman is featured in the latest episode of our podcast On Side.

Michelle played for Australia 61 times between 2010-2018, booting 20 goals before a series of injuries forced her to retire from international duties in 2019.

When Cortnee Vine’s penalty kick hit the back of the net against France, the whole of Australia roared as one. The recognition and support was a long time coming, says the former Australian striker.

“This is something that I think every single Matilda or every single female athlete has wanted for such a long time, she says. “To see something so special like our World Cup, to see those numbers, to see the amount of people in the stands on home soil is incredible. We've pushed for this. We've tried to sell our brand for a very long time.”

She says the support the team received from other sporting teams – men and women - was incredible.

“Seeing the Boomers with all their jerseys on and changing the time of their game just so they could watch the girls, that's something special.”

The W-League all-time record goal-scorer also talks about the Matildas' inspiring run to the semis, the growth of female sport and what keeps driving her on the pitch.

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The latest episode of our podcast On Side explores the evolution of Paralympic sport in Australia. It also discusses the need to include Paralympic voices in the decision making, along with the role Paralympic sport can play as a vehicle for greater social inclusion and to understanding disability.

It features Paralympians:

Ella Sabljak, an Australian wheelchair basketball and rugby player, and a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Athlete Council and Sport Integrity Australia’s Athlete Advisory Group, and

Richard Nicholson, a two-time Paralympic silver medallist and part of Sport Integrity Australia’s Sports Partnerships team.

What began as a simple “rallying of the troops” as a team captain has led to multiple roles as an advocate for athletes for Ella, including as a member of Paralympics Australia’s Athlete Commission.

“I’ve always fought for the underdog and love helping athletes have their own voice,” she says. “You don’t really realise that athletes’ voices aren’t heard. It’s not until you’re sitting back at home after the fact and you really wish you could have made an impact or you’re seeing things differently, so I think that reflection piece as an athlete moving forward has really shaped how I carry myself and how I approach situations now.”

Her appointment on the WADA Athlete Council is testament to her efforts in standing up for athletes, however she urges us all to be a “champion of change, so no one is left behind”.

She also discusses the Paralympic classification system, doping in Paralympic sport, discrimination and the need for education.

Richard, a two-time Paralympic medallist across two sports, discusses the evolution of Paralympics and disability sport in Australia.

When he first began competing in disability sports he says he “didn’t know where” he fitted in among a “confusing” number of competing agencies.

He says his first Paralympics experience in Atlanta was disappointing, in terms of the experience and his results.

“Like all athletes, I was excited to get inside the village and when we arrived there was a swarm of tradies tearing down various events and various things inside the village and dismantling it and I thought ‘what’s going on here, we haven’t even started yet?’ The Paralympics in 1996 were literally saved by a philanthropic donation … or those Games would have been cancelled all together.”

However, there was one incident at the Sydney Paralympic Games that changed his feelings about sport and his role within it. While he on his way to watch an event he came across a young boy with his mum, who asked her: “I wonder what sport that man plays?”

The Games was a “watershed moment” for disability sport in Australia, he adds.

“That’s when I started looking at the bigger picture and how I could be involved in changing that for the better.”

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The latest episode of our podcast On Side looks at the issue of safeguarding participants of sport. It discusses the findings of the Australian Child Maltreatment Study and what it means for sport, and the work done as a result of Sport Integrity Australia’s review of the Western Australian Institute of Sport’s Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Program.

The interview features:

Professor Daryl Higgins Director, Institute of Child Protection Studies, Australian Catholic University

Kait McNamara Director, Child Safeguarding, Department of Local Sport and Cultural Industries (Western Australia)

Emma Gardner A/g Director Safeguarding, Sport Integrity Australia.

Professor Higgins revealed the findings of the Australian Child Maltreatment Study which showed 62% of Australians had experienced 1 or more types of maltreatment.

Concerningly, maltreatment is chronic, not isolated, according to the study, with 2 in 5 experiencing maltreatment.

“We're just scratching the surface,” he said.  “We know that many forms of abuse and neglect are more prevalent for women compared to men and … looked at changes over time, gender differences, age cohort differences and that's really the power of a study as comprehensive as ours is.”

He said the response to the study was positive.

“We're already seeing that in terms of different sectors saying how valuable the data is to them, both in terms of prevention, knowing how extensive it is and therefore what are some of the drivers that we need to be addressing in our community, but also in terms of responses.

“We know now that one of the really significant drivers of the scourge that we have in Australia of mental ill health is childhood experiences of abuse and neglect.”

McNamara said the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse showed there was no type of institution that escaped this type of abuse and harm of children.

However, that the response from sport is crucial.

“It’s crucial for them being just aware of who can support them if something does happen at their club, who do they need to contact in the police, who do they need to contact … So I think it's around not putting our heads in the sand and making sure we just accept the fact these things could happen.

“We prevent them where we can, but if they do occur, how do we support that young person in a very, very critical moment because that can really shape how they then move forward from their journey.”

The key risk areas identified by the Royal Commission – such as transporting children and overnight stays – are still the same key increased risk areas that Sport Integrity Australia was seeing, according to Gardner, from Sport Integrity Australia.

“Overwhelmingly the largest proportion of complaints [Sport Integrity Australia receives] involve children,” she said.

Those complaints snowballed after the release of the documentary Athlete A, but “gymnastics is not an island”, she said.

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Former Olympic sprinter Patrick Johnson has joined Sport Integrity Australia as a Culture and Safety Advisor to ensure our responses are appropriate and informed.

In this edition of On Side, Patrick talks about his role in helping to develop an agency and a sporting landscape that is culturally capable, respectful and engaging.

“I think there's a shift to understanding sport as a vehicle for health, for education, to awareness, but also know what it means around reconciliation,” he says. “And I think that there's a sense of the next nine years until Brisbane 2032 that we want to ensure that all Australians are part of the Olympic Games and part of sport and that's probably a bigger picture that we've looked at.”

He says the shift is even more important with the 2032 Olympics on the horizon.

“You can see the shift around real respect, real acknowledgment and real understanding. There has to be a pathway regardless of where you live in this country. If you want to be a great sports person then let's make sure you have the opportunity ... It should be not just for the rich, it should be for every single person in this country to aspire, believe and could be part of.”

He says the great thing about many athletes is that they are driving the change themselves because they see Australia and sport as diverse and multicultural.

“But how do we ensure that it's for everyone? And I think the great thing that we've got in Australia, there's a real movement within athletes in this country that are really the game changers.”

Best known for being the only Australian man to smash the 10-second barrier for the 100m, Patrick also discusses his career path, the importance of language, the role of the media, and his hopes for the future of sport.

We also talk to former Australian Diamond captain and world champion Caitlin Bassett who, too, has recently taken up a role at Sport Integrity Australia as an Athlete Educator.

Education has come a long way since she began her career, she says.

“The information that I was getting at the start of my career and the information I was getting at the end was vastly different,” she says. “I was always learning every time we came together to do an education session, whether it being around drugs and sport, whether it be around integrity issues, around wagering and betting in sport and things like that, it was always something new and something learning because sport was evolving at such a rapid rate.”

For many years the poster girl for Australian netball, she says the profile also came at a price, particularly when social media came along.

“By opening up your life and sharing your life to them “[fans] is a great way, I guess, to bring them along on the ride with you,” she says, “but you are also opening yourself up to the negative side and that is obviously abuse and some of the unkind comments that come along with it.”

Those comments were not only from “fans” ready to critique her performance, but from disgruntled gamblers, she says.

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In the latest episode of our podcast On Side, esteemed lawyers Richard Young and Adair Donaldson provide incredible insights into their roles, including on anti-doping and abuse cases.

Young, a leader in anti-doping litigation, has worked on the cases against Tour de France winners Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis, Marion Jones, and the BALCO doping scandal. He also worked on the Essendon supplements case.

He says he lost sleep over “all of them” and admits there has been push back as a result of his work.

“I'm not real welcome in China because of Sun Yang,” Young admits. “I'm not going back to Russia because of my role in the Russian investigation. After the Essendon case I sure got a lot of letters from Melbourne … I’ve been back to Melbourne, but I don't think I'd run for political office there.”

Adair Donaldson, who specialises in assisting survivors of trauma, says the independence offered by National Integrity Framework gives sports a lot of comfort.

“That's really very important,” he says.

He admits, however, that the Framework will not always satisfy everybody.

“And that's going to be the case no matter what … [it’s] a lot better than what we've had in the past, so that to me, is a really good step in the right direction.”

Donaldson, who works closely with sporting bodies addressing cultural issues with respect to harassment, abuse, violence, and alcohol-related issues, suspects the reason why athletes are coming forward now is that “they feel confident that they will be listened to. Isn't that good? Because in the past these people have just suffered in silence.”

Young admits prosecuting abuse, particularly emotional abuse, is difficult.

“That will be one of the issues for Sport Integrity Australia. Is it emotional abuse? Is it motivational coaching? Is it what good coaches do? Or is it emotional abuse? And you know they’re egregious examples like coaches beating their athletes, physical abuse, but the emotional abuse gets tough, but you gotta deal with the cases and bring them if you want kids to be safe in sport or you want any athlete to be safe in sport.”

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Guests: Dr Sian Clancy, Alexis Cooper, Kelsa Ferguson, Cassie Fien and Nick Paterson

In this episode of On Side we discuss the dangers of supplements and the importance of education in anti-doping to prevent inadvertent doping due to supplements.

This podcast discussion features:

• Dr Sian Clancy, Drug Free Sport New Zealand’s (DFSNZ) General Manager Athlete Services,
• Alexis Cooper, Sport Integrity Australia’s Director of Education and Innovation,
• Kelsa Ferguson, US Anti-Doping Agency’s Health Professional Educator Specialist, and
• Cassie Fien, Sport Integrity Australia’s Athlete Advisory Group member who was sanctioned for inadvertent supplement use.

For the first time in over a decade in Australia, not a single athlete tested positive to a doping test due to a supplement.

“We [Sport Integrity Australia] realised that we really had to change what we did and what we said,” Cooper said. “So the first thing that we did really was change our messaging.

“Athletes we know are exposed to supplements. We know that some dietitians and nutritionists are telling them to take supplements and some of them are just doing it of their own accord, so we changed it to we recommend Food First. But if you have to take a supplement then you should be using a batch-tested one. That's really the only option as an athlete. And then we took the next step of creating the Sport Integrity app, which included a list of batch-tested supplements sold in Australia to make it easy for athletes to actually do that.”

Inadvertent supplement positives is not an isolated problem, Ferguson said, the problem is global and wider than simply athletes.

“We have cases every year that they're related to supplement use and contamination so supplement risk or a huge part of our athlete education,” she said. “There are many of health professionals out there and doctors that also aren't aware of the risks and they're recommending supplement use to athletes. And it's important for us to educate them the same way that we educate athletes on here, or the risk here where you can go and check.”

Dr Clancy said DFSNZ is focusing on “understanding, I guess, the normalisation of this and the prevalence of supplement use in trying as best we can to provide those tools to athletes so that they can navigate what is a really complex environment”.

Australian marathon runner Cassie Fien found out about the danger of supplements the hard way – and was sanctioned for nine months. She “still suffers from mental health issues” as a result.

“I did have a choice to just go and hideaway and never go back to my sport,” she said. “But that wasn't an option for me in the sense of it's a part of my identity. It's my purpose in life and it's what brings me so much joy. Also I knew that I didn't have anything to be ashamed of… I still take responsibility for it in the sense of my maybe naivety for being not as educated as I need it to be.”

Later in the program, we also talk to the Drug Free Sport New Zealand CEO Nick Paterson about his views on education, anti-doping globally and the recent announcement that New Zealand will be combining all of its sport integrity jurisdictions to be under one roof.

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President of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Witold Bańka says the agency is monitoring the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

Speaking on Sport Integrity Australia’s On Side podcast at the WADA Global Education Conference, Bańka said the situation remained very complex.   

“The fact that Russian and Belarussian athletes are not competing in internationally, at least majority of them, some of them they are able to compete as in neutral, but the majority are sanctioned, is very, very complicated,” he said.  

“We decided not to close the open line of communication with RUSADA. The world cannot create a paradise for cheats.”  

WADA’s president believes the anti-doping system is currently working well but acknowledges there is always room for improvement.

 “It's a race, you know. It's a race with the cheats,” he said. “We have to be stronger. We have to be faster. We have to have better tools to eradicate doping from sports. The rules are OK, [the] system works, but we still have to think ‘how we can do more?’”

Bańka also talks about the biggest challenges WADA faces, the role education plays in WADA’s development and balancing their role of catching and punishing versus protecting and supporting.

We also sit down with WADA’s Athlete Committee Chair Ben Sandford and 4 x Olympian and Integrity Manager for Boxing, Judo and Taekwondo Bronwen Knox to discuss the importance of the athlete’s voice.

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Today we meet the science and medicine team behind our anti-doping efforts.

In this episode of On Side, our host Tim Gavel talks to some of Sport Integrity Australia’s science and medicine experts - Chief Science Officer Dr Naomi Speers, Science Officer Rima Chakrabarty and Medical Advisor Dr Laura Lallenec.

The trio discusses all things anti-doping - prohibited substances and methods in sports, the dangers supplements pose to an athlete’s career, putting the pieces of the anti-doping puzzle together, and our role working with support personnel and medical professionals to educate athletes.

The evolving nature of anti-doping is part of the attraction for Dr Speers.

“The challenge is keeping on top of everything that’s changing,” Dr Speers says. “Different substances that people might be using and keeping aware of them and making sure that athletes are aware [of the risks], but also changing technology and understanding that and thinking about how can we apply that.

“We have a Blood Passport which looks for blood doping, a Steroid Passport which looks for doping with testosterone and next year an Endocrine Passport [will be included], which will look for doping with growth hormone.”

Trying to understand a doping scenario and apply it to the results is one aspect that fascinates Chakrabarty.

“Is there a physiological cause for that? Is there potentially other substances that have been used, like non-prohibited substances that can cause the impact on the Steroid Passport, for example? And also is your physiology affecting it?

“Have you been doing a lot of training and that's affecting your blood passport? Or have you been to a specific location, like in an altitude … It's got a lot more nuance to it."

“It’s really interesting just to be able to sit down and look at it, what’s possible and try and put a lot more pieces together.”

Dr Lallenec, who is currently Head Doctor at AFL premiership team Melbourne, joined the agency in January to provide medical guidance on sport integrity matters such as the use of prohibited substances and methods in sports, safeguarding of children in the sporting environment, as well as for investigations and intelligence matters.

“I love health administration and health governance as well as public health, so it's sort of combines those two things from me.”

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