After her track and field career, Ludmila Engquist focused on bobsleigh with the goal of winning a medal at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002.
But the venture ended after a doping control in Lillehammer in 2001. Ludmila Engquist tested positive for anabolic steroids, ended her sports career and left the public eye.
In the new book “Ludmila, svenskare kan ingen vara” written together with the journalist Johar Bendjelloul and the author Henrik Johnsson, Engquist admits that during a visit to Russia in the summer of 2001 she bought a protein powder that she knew contained methandrostenolone, an anabolic steroid known in Sweden “Russian fives”, and drank it with water.
Believes that doping was the only way out
The purpose, according to Ludmila Engquist, was to get stuck so that she did not have to continue with the bobsled, because she was terrified before every ride and felt increasingly worse mentally.
“I hated bobsledding. It was a complete nightmare. Constant unhappiness; before, during and after training – day and night,” she says in the book.
According to Engquist, she saw doping as the only way out.
“I never really considered saying it like it was, that I wanted to drop out because I was terrified and depressed. It was impossible to reverse, the speed was too high and the stakes were too great, on all levels.
Huge efforts had been made, well-known sponsors were involved and everything was based on my nickname (…) Moreover, everything was my idea from the beginning. Everything rested on my shoulders. There was no going back.”
Engquist today: “I have made enormous mistakes”
She describes the appearance of the doping inspectors in Lillehammer as a liberation.
“There was nothing to hide, I wanted to get caught. End the madness. Get rid of the fear. No one could have stopped me, not even myself. Now the doping police would take me.”
At the end of the book, which will be released on Friday 13 September, the now 60-year-old Engquist reflects on his fate. And believes that something positive still came out of it all: the son Elias, whom she had after her elite sports career.
“Had I not ruined my life with doping powder, Elias would not have existed (…) I have made enormous mistakes and I am, in a way, a product of my defeats. They shaped me, for better or for worse.”