Career
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. In 1999 Engquist was diagnosed with breast cancer. 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.
In late 2001, however, she was found guilty of having recently used banned drugs and barred from competition for two years.
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. The penalty term ended in December 2003, but Engquist has not returned to competition since then