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Adelaide Crows chairman says class action over controversial camp remains ‘hypothetical’

Adelaide Crows chairman John Olsen addresses the media.

Adelaide Crows chairman John Olsen says the club has not sought legal advice despite talk of a class action in the wake of Eddie Betts’ claims about a controversial 2018 training camp.

Mr Olsen described any such move against the club as “hypothetical”, and also defended the way the club had responded in the seven days since the publication of Betts’ memoir The Boy from Boomerang Crescent.

The book details Betts’ anxiety and anger following the preseason camp, and prompted former Crow Josh Jenkins to speak out as well.

Adelaide lawyer Greg Griffin said he had begun investigating a potential class action against the club, on behalf of several players who attended the camp.

“Any action would be brought in the Supreme Court of Victoria, which requires a minimum of seven group members to bring and maintain a class action,” he said.

“The number of persons, or players, is well in excess of the number that we require.”

But Mr Olsen, who earlier this week issued a public apology to Betts and Jenkins, told ABC Radio Adelaide such a development would be addressed if and when it arose.

“It is hypothetical, because until it takes place it’s not fact, and if it takes place, we’ll address the issue at that time,” he said.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.
Adelaide Crows chairman John Olsen speaks to ABC Radio Adelaide’s Stacey Lee and Nikolai Beilharz.

Mr Olsen said he had spoken to all the club’s board members in the past week, but issues for discussion did not include the position of board member Mark Ricciuto who, on his Triple M breakfast show last week, said “the club has moved on from “the camp.

“Mark’s position at the board was not discussed at the meeting over the weekend. That’s not on my agenda at the moment,” Mr Olsen said.

Mr Olsen joined the club in 2020, two years after the now infamous camp.

Denials of a ‘cover-up’

The former SA premier denied the club had sought to conceal the controversy at the time, and said player welfare was the current “priority”.

“I think that’s a stretch to say there was a cover-up. People were dealing with a difficult situation,” he said.

“A number of individuals indicated to me they had a very positive experience at the camp.

“[But receiving] confidential information given by a player, and that being used in front of others at the camp, is inexcusable.

“Those circumstances cannot, and will not, happen again.”

Eddie Betts salutes the crowd.
A crowd favorite during his time at Adelaide, Betts returned to Carlton at the end of the 2019 season.(AAP: David Mariuz)

Since the publication of Betts’ book, Mr Olsen has confined himself to individual interviews and statements, rather than holding a media conference — an approach he defended.

“I have made myself available across the board, to radio, print and television,” he said.

“Shortly after Eddie Betts’s book had been released, and his comments related to chapter 17, [chief executive] Tim Silvers was immediately available on that Wednesday and immediately apologised.”

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Adelaide Crows apologizes to former AFL star Eddie Betts following new book airing claims about preseason training camp

Inside the 'weird' and 'disrespectful' training camp that robbed Eddie Betts of his passion for football

Former AFL champion Eddie Betts says his form slumped after he felt disrespected and traumatized at an Adelaide Crows preseason training trip, accusing the camp of cultural insensitivities.

Betts’s biography The Boy from Boomerang Crescent, which was released today, includes a chapter on the controversial 2018 Adelaide Crows’ preseason training camp following a devastating defeat to Richmond in the 2017 grand final.

In it, Betts describes the anxiety and anger he felt following the camp and the subsequent fallout.

AFL Players’ Association chief executive Paul Marsh said the association would contact all players who attended the 2018 camp to get a better understanding of issues that might have arisen.

In a statement, he said the association had previously spoken to players about the camp, but based on the experience detailed in Betts’s book, he now believed “players felt pressured into remaining silent.”

“The details outlined by Eddie Betts in his new book about the 2018 Adelaide Crows training camp are extremely concerning and difficult to read,” he said.

“We commend Eddie on the courage he’s shown in telling this story and are troubled by the ongoing hurt caused to Eddie and his family.”

In one example, Betts wrote how personal details he had confidentially shared with a camp counselor were used to verbally abuse him in front of teammates during a physically and emotionally grievous “initiation.”

Among the insults yelled while he “crawled through the dirt” was that the father-of-five would be a “sh** father” as he was “raised by only his mother.”

Betts, who joined the Geelong coaching team following his retirement last year, described the incident as “traumatizing” and had him “broken to tears”.

Eddie Betts holds his hands out and looks at a yellow AFL ball while being challenged by a Suns player
Eddie Betts returned to Carlton in 2020.(AAP: Dave Hunt)

The 350-game veteran said teammates were recruited to verbally abuse each other during the same exercise.

“I’ll live with this shame for the rest of my life,” he said.

Betts said players at the camp were prevented from showering, had to surrender their phones, and were transported blindfolded on a bus that “reeked of off food” with the Richmond theme song loudly playing on loop.

Betts details how First Nations rituals were misappropriated, which he found “extremely disrespectful”, and references to sacred Aboriginal words “were chucked around in a carefree manner”.

“When I started to talk to people around me about my experience, I started to realize that what we’d been put through was all just a bit f***** up, and I rightly became angry,” he said.

A man and a woman with five children gathered around them stand on a dirt path in front of a tree
Eddie Betts with his wife Anna and five children in Darwin in November 2021.(Instagram: annascullie)

Betts said he raised his concerns with the club and asked to remove Aboriginal players from further “mind training exercises” with the company behind the camp, which continued to work with the Crows until later that year. The club “mutually agreed to part ways” with the company in June.

“Three weeks after I addressed the team about my concerns, I was told that I hadn’t been re-elected to the leadership group. I was devastated,” he wrote.

Crows chief executive Tim Silvers, who only joined the club last year, said he would investigate Betts’s claims that he had been dropped from the leadership group as a result of raising his concerns.

Silvers said he was “saddened” to read the impact the camp had had on Betts.

“It obviously hurt him in a number of ways,” he said.

Silvers described Betts as a “legend” who “lit up the Adelaide Oval for a long period of time”.

A man wearing a suit speaks to microphones in front of a blue and red banner
Adelaide Crows chief executive Tim Silvers apologized to Betts for his experience at the camp.(ABC News: Camron Slessor)

Silvers acknowledged the camp “probably wasn’t the right move at that time” and apologized to Betts and “any of our playing group who had a negative experience.”

“To have someone like Eddie, who has now left our club, to have a negative experience, saddens me,” he said.

Silvers said the club had new leadership and was moving “in a positive direction”.

Betts acknowledged in the book that a SafeWork SA inquiry had cleared the club of breaching any workplace safety laws, but he wrote: “My view remains that the activities there were inappropriate, counter-productive and culturally unsafe.”

books of eddie betts on bookshelf, with his face on the front cover
Eddie Betts’s biography, The Boy from Boomerang Crescent, reveals claims about the Crows’ preseason training camp.(ABC News: Ben Pettit)

In a statement made in 2018, the Crows said SafeWork SA’s investigation “found neither the club nor any other person or organisation, breached any work health and safety laws during or in relation to the camp”.

SafeWork SA provided no more information about the investigation.

Crows player Rory Laird, who also attended the camp, described Betts as one of his “close mates” and a “loved figure” at the club.

“I think each individual had different experiences and I actually wasn’t on that part of the camp I guess, so I can’t really comment on the ins and outs of it,” he said.

“But obviously as a former teammate and a friend, you don’t like hearing about that.”

Betts, who moved to Carlton in 2020, wrote of the continuing toll the camp took, saying his “on-field form slumped” at the start of the following season and describing 2018 as “tough.”

“Personally, I felt like I’d lost the drive to play footy, and to be honest I’m not sure I ever had the same energy I did before that camp,” he wrote.

The ABC has contacted Collective Minds for comment.

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