Ludmila Engquist takes part in an SVT documentary.
Photo: SVT
Ludmila Engquist together with her husband Johan.
Photo: LENNART MÅNSSON / BILDBYRÅN
After the doping scandal, Ludmila Engquist went underground.
She fled to a secret location in Spain, where she tried to take her own life. Something she told SVT’s Stina Dabrowski Lundberg about in 2005.
– I just wanted to die. That was the only thought.
Then followed years of silence.
But in 2018, she made an exception and wrote a long letter to Expressen.
There, the former hurdler, who just a couple of months after becoming a Swedish citizen won Olympic gold in Atlanta in 1996, talked about the difficult time.
“I would be so deeply happy if you could just forget about me. I am and have never been someone special. For many years I suffered from severe depression, and I still struggle with the after effects of my cancer. Life is not easy every day”.
Ludmila Engquist speaks out in SVT
Now Engquist is ready to talk again.
In a two-part SVT documentary, which will be shown on April 28, the now 60-year-old Ludmila Enquist talks about everything. There she tells, among other things, that she and Johan Engquist divorced.
– I am not often in Sweden at all. It’s divorce and all. I haven’t had my family here but in Altea, Spain. He (Johan) lives there, but quite a distance away, she says in a conversation with former national team colleagues Erica Johanson and Maria Akraka.
– My children also live there and they are the only ones I have. I have no one else, in the whole world I have only those two.
Ludmila Engquist had previously competed for Russia. After the national team change in 1996, she became a Swedish national hero overnight. The Olympic gold in Atlanta also paved the way for the Bragdguldet and the Jerring Prize the following year.
But she never thinks about her career.
– Absolutely not, because then it will be difficult. Of course I feel guilty and I haven’t processed it at all. I haven’t talked to anyone about it, she says.
“Finally I’m free”
In 1999, Enquist suffered from breast cancer and the following year she ended her athletics career due to a damaged hamstring. After that, she began a venture into bobsledding.
But it all ended in one big scandal, when Engquist was caught in a doping control.
In SVT’s documentary “Ludmila”, she says that the bobsled venture was her idea rather than her ex-husband Johan’s.
– It was my idea, but not because I wanted to go bobsledding. It was that I hadn’t processed my depression when I quit. I didn’t stop running because I was done without the hamstring not working anymore. Then I felt terribly bad. Then there was an opportunity with the bob to be involved in some plan and investment.
In the documentary people around Ludmila about the ex-husband’s power.
– Johan had an incredibly great need for control. It was carefully planned what we would train and do. He controlled everything. He ruled and owned her, she didn’t have her own mobile for example. All conversations went through him, says Annica Sandström, who was initially part of the bobsled venture.
The documentary’s producer Olle Palmlöf believes that the divorce between Ludmila and Johan Engquist made everything possible.
The protagonist himself says:
– With the separation, I feel more free in thought, I finally get to do and think what I want. It is absolutely not an easy situation, but of course I feel more free. Maybe it’s also cowardly to stay where it’s comfortable, but I’m 60 soon so I choose the most comfortable way to live.
At the same time, it is clear that Ludmila Engquist will release an autobiography, “Ludmila – Svenskare kan ingen vara”, written together with Johar Bendjelloul and Henrik Johnsson.
– On Sunday I turn 60 and for the first time I am free to tell my story as I want. No one rules over me anymore. I don’t have to think about anyone else and I’m responsible for everything, says Engquist.