Nielsen's fall from grace

A tennis pro since he was 17, Mark Nielsen says not being able to play has left him feeling thwarted. Picture / Chris Skelton

He was six foot one, blond, tanned and toned, with a Clutch Cargo jaw and blue eyes that sparkled like trophies in the sun.

As New Zealand Tennis' No 1 player, Mark Nielsen led a life of glamour and excitement, globetrotting for nine months a year and playing some of the world's greatest tennis players. Once ranked 16th best junior in the world, he was, until early this year, New Zealand Tennis' golden boy.

His downfall? A desire to keep those golden locks. When he started losing his hair in his early 20s, Nielsen kept secret from almost everyone the fact that he was taking anti-balding medication. He was too embarrassed to bring it up with his coach and manager, and he was too embarrassed to announce it on a drugs declaration at the Australian Open in January.

So the humiliation was complete when urine tests revealed finasteride, a common ingredient in male pattern baldness medication, recently banned as a potential masking agent.

Slated as a drug cheat and outed as a young man with premature hair loss, he was banned from tennis for two years.

"[As it was] a personal drug, I didn't tell anybody," Nielsen says, "and that cost me two of my best years. For keeping a secret. For keeping it personal, really.

"It wasn't a secret. If you had confronted me, I wouldn't have run away from the fact I was taking it."

These days Nielsen can be found at Belmont Park Racquets Club, a suburban seven-court facility on Auckland's North Shore, where he is coaching novice players. It's his first non-playing job since he turned professional at 17.

He has been here a week. On court lobbing balls at a client, Nielsen is trying hard to be enthusiastic.

"That's good foot work on the backhand," he shouts to the young man sweating and grunting on the other side of the net. But his expression rarely changes under his black cap. And his long arms hang like nonchalant levers from his broad, rounded shoulders.

Later he explains: "I feel like a caged animal really. I just want to fight, I guess is the word, but it's not fighting, it's just playing a sport.

"I feel like I've got all this energy inside me but I can't release it. Because I made a mistake."

Some mistake. In a cruel twist, Nielsen now has permission from the International Tennis Federation to use his hair-loss drug when and if he returns from his ban in 2008.

All he had to do was ask.

Meanwhile, he can't play international tennis or national competitions for 24 months, and Tennis New Zealand has advised local clubs to prevent him from playing interclub, too, "in the spirit of the suspension".

That makes Nielsen bristle. "I would have hoped they showed a bit more loyalty, a little more heart."

He hopes local clubs will let him play anyway. He needs to practise, he needs games. He wants to be back when the ban is over. Even if he does get to play interclub, it may not be enough to regain his national or international ranking.

Yes, he's angry. But his seething restraint is palpable.

"I spent basically my whole being playing tennis. It was all I wanted to do, all I ever thought about."

Ever since he was a baby resting in his carrycot under the trees at Milford Tennis Courts, this was his destiny. Lulled to sleep by the pok, pok, pok of his mother's game, as soon as he was old enough to hold a racket, he was giving it a go himself.

By 12 he was handpicked to be part of Tennis New Zealand's elite junior training squad. He enjoys the story of how he was late for third-form geography at Kings College in Otahuhu every Monday after training.

His teacher knew where he had been, but a ritual apology needed to be performed each week.

"This one particular time he got pissed off," Nielsen remembers. "I had to go in and say to the teacher 'Sorry, Sir, I'm late', and he said to me in this big voice in front of the class 'Nielsen! What's more important, school or tennis?' And I turned around straight away and said 'Tennis, Sir', because tennis was more important." The teacher asked him again. Nielsen knew he would be trapped all day if he didn't give the right answer. "School, Sir," he replied. And sat down.

In reality there was no time for school. He left after fifth form to concentrate on tennis fulltime.

He had already represented New Zealand, playing in Brisbane at age 12. The memory is still clear.

"I still remember the experience of travelling with a racquet on my back. It's really, really strange now to travel anywhere and not have a racquet on my back. It doesn't feel right.

"Even not having a racquet in my hand, my arm just feels short and useless. And all of a sudden it comes alive when I put a racquet in it."

By the time he was 16, he was travelling six months of the year. At age 17, he earned his first Association of Tennis Professionals point and was internationally ranked.

"At 17, I spent nine months overseas, and I spent nine months overseas every year since - till I got banned."

Now he has had to put down roots. Suddenly, he is a 29-year-old grown-up in need of a job and a home - he's living in his parents' studio apartment - trying to come to grips with a bizarre new reality.

"It's pretty boring," he confesses. "How do you live in one place for 12 months? How do you get up and do the same thing every day? Socially, it's just so different, living in one place and seeing the same people every day.

"A lot of guys on the tour, they act a certain way because they can, because next week they won't see you. If you piss them off, they'll tell you what they think. There's no PC stuff because who cares? Next week, or even the next day, he's on a train or a plane going somewhere else.

"So there's heaps of stuff that I have to learn, that I probably didn't fully learn because I started travelling so early."

There's one silver lining - he has a girlfriend, a supportive, caring woman he met since the ban. He smiles. "Probably what you might call my second girl-friend. All the others have been short-term relationships that don't last because of travelling."

Nielsen was resting up from an injury in March when the federation called about his blood results following the Australian Open.

It was brutally officious. "They told me, 'Look, you've tested positive and you need to find a lawyer'.

"I didn't know the name of the drug. I knew the name of what the doctors were giving me. They were happily writing prescriptions and handing it to me, and I was taking it."

Nielsen's hair-loss product, a prescription medicine he had been taking for more than three years on the advice of two doctors, contains finasteride. Though not a performance enhancing drug, finasteride wasbanned early last year when it was discovered that it could mask the presence of steroid drugs.

As Nielsen explains it, he had lulled himself into a false sense of security. For three years he had been subjected to drug tests. Nothing had ever come up, so he assumed he was fine.

He had no idea that finasteride had been added to the banned substances list, he says. He didn't even notice when Argentine player Mariano Hood was banned for a year after testing positive for the substance at last year's French Open. Nielsen says he was playing in America and Europe at the time and didn't hear the news.

But his ignorance didn't wash with the International Tennis Federation's anti-doping tribunal, which said it was a professional player's job to know what drugs were banned.

Nielsen had failed to include the medication on a declaration form at the Australian Open because he didn't want to tell a stranger he was taking it and told the tribunal he was embarrassed that he didn't know how to spell the name of the drug.

The tribunal slammed him for making no effort to check if the drug was permitted and, despite agreeing that he hadn't taken anything that enhanced his performance, slapped him with the ban.

It came as a huge shock. Nielsen says he was told to expect 12 months at the most. He could have challenged the sentence and flown to London to appeal the length of the ban. But at best that would have trimmed six months off and cost him at least $40,000.

Once ranked 172, Nielsen was ranked 329th in the world at the time. "I don't make that kind of money in six months. It made sense not to do it."

Nevertheless, it irks him that he's categorised as a drugs cheat along with Olympic track athletes who had pumped themselves full of steroids and cyclists such as Floyd Landis, who lost his Tour de France title when his testosterone level was found to be seven times higher than normal.

"I'm not even in the same stratosphere as those guys."

Even Mariano Puerta, the Argentine found to have taken performance enhancing steroids after the 2005 French Open, had his ban cut on appeal from eight years to two.

But Nielsen is resigned to his fate. "Well, yeah, I'm very angry. I could be sitting in front of you firing my pistol off in this direction and that direction, but what's that going to achieve?"

He does, however, question whether there should have been systems in place that would have insulated him.

"It was ultimately my fault; I take responsibility, that's fine.

"But there were other people that could have helped. I had two doctors giving me it who knew exactly who I was; I had one chemist that was giving it out - he knew exactly who I was.

"We had a physio trainer in the Davis Cup. If he'd known, he would have found out straight away that it was banned, but he didn't know because I didn't tell him.

"There was no system in place to bump it out of me, to encourage me to speak out about it."

And so Nielsen finds himself at Belmont Park Racquets Club looking for clients. He enjoys coaching, he says, and he wants more individuals or groups to teach.

But his focus is still on his own game. When the ban lifts, he will be 30, out of practice and unranked. He tries to keep his hand in playing top junior players, including Austin Childs, the star 18-year-old who travels from Tauranga most weekends. But it's just not the same.

"The reason why I was good was because it was my job to be good. I like to perform under pressure and to play a match with something on it. I don't like to play for fun. I'm not one of these young PC kids who don't get to score."

He may or may not rise back to No 1 again, but Nielsen would like to have his reputation back. People who know him believe in him, he reckons. "They know that if I was going to take drugs, it would have been when I was 20, not 28. I'd be a moron to start now.

"And, why take drugs if you're not getting a huge return in terms of money? Why would you do it? It just doesn't make sense. It's just an honest mistake, and I hope that the public who don't know me, I hope they believe it, too."