Ludmila Viktorovna Engquist (née Leonova (Russian: Людмила Викторовна Нарожиленко-Леонова).

For her 1997 victory in Athens, Engquist received the Svenska Dagbladet Gold Medal,[1] the first non-native Swede to win this award.

During these years she became one of the most popular woman athletes of Sweden and was sometimes dubbed a role model for younger native Swedish talents.

After surgery she stopped chemotherapy after 4 treatments because she did not want the drugs to interfere with her athletic career, and successfully returned to the track.

Her admission of drug use, though only during the recent part of her bobsleigh effort, made her a very controversial person in Sweden and considering that she had tested positive for banned drugs once before, during her days as a Soviet runner, and had sustained a ban (which was appealed and lifted after a while) some alleged that she had been using performance-enhancing substances regularly all the time, a claim for which there is no evidence.