Adelaide Crows won '98 premiership on supplement that carries a warning on WADA website Huge high:Adelaide coach Malcolm Blight (left) and captain Mark Bickley raise the 1998 premiership cup with their teammates. ADELAIDE pushed the boundaries in its 1998 premiership season by using colostrum, one of the supplements that carries a warning on the World Anti-Doping Authority's website and has been linked to Essendon. But those around the Crows at the time remain confident no rules were broken. The club was open about its practices at the time, describing the supplement - derived from a mammal's breast milk - as a natural help in warding off illness and help recovery. The danger with colostrum is that it contains a growth hormone that is illegal. The WADA website, addressing the list of banned substances for 2013, says: "Colostrum is not prohibited per se, however it contains certain quantities of IGF-1 and other growth factors which are prohibited and can influence the outcome of anti-doping tests. Therefore WADA does not recommend the ingestion of this product. The reason the Crows were so confident they were clean was because of the club doctor, the late Brian Sando. Sando was a former president of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, a long-serving chief Olympic medical officer and Davis Cup doctor. He was a staunch crusader against performance-enhancing drugs. But a Crows insider said it proved how fine the line was, and said the club had always looked for innovations. "It's about having the right people in the right places, and we had Dr Sando," he said. If you have the right people, and everything goes through them, you're not going to cross the line. University of South Australia physiologist John Buckley pioneered trials of bovine colostrum in 1998. "If you're taking colostrum then you'll be able to recover better, between training sessions, train harder at subsequent sessions, and therefore improve your overall fitness and your performance," Buckley said. There is a strong trend there for greater increases in muscle mass and reductions in body fat in the people who were on the colostrum.