Is Jones Out of These Worlds?

Ludmila Engquist, who, along with Gail Devers, has dominated the women’s high hurdles in the ‘90s, rolled over in bed one morning in March and felt a lump in her right breast. You can guess what she felt next, nausea, fear. She doesn’t want to discuss it now. But she will say that she knew she had to see a doctor, and she knew the news would be bad.

Even when Engquist was among the stone-faced Soviets on the track and field circuit, you had the feeling she was one who would smile if it had been allowed by the KGB agents who traveled with them. There was mischief behind her aqua blue eyes.

Years later, despite everything she has gone through with a very public divorce, a citizenship change and chemotherapy, it remains there, behind the tiny Swedish flags on her contact lenses.

But I’ve never trusted her as far as I can put a 16-pound shot.

In 1992, the year after she won the first of her two world championships under her married name at the time, Ludmila Narozhilenko, she was one of four Russian athletes denied entry into Sweden when a customs check uncovered steroids in their luggage.

They were tested immediately upon returning home and found clean, but, still, the word was out on her. By then, it had been a long time since anyone even peripherally involved in the sport could be naive about drugs.

In 1993, she did test positive for a steroid and was banned by the International Amateur Athletic Federation for four years. She sued her husband, Nikolai, who confessed in a Russian court that he had replaced 35 of her protein pills with steroids. He said he was spiteful because he suspected she was having an affair with her Swedish agent, Johan Engquist, who is now her husband.

The IAAF reinstated her in 1995 due to “exceptional circumstances,” although officials now say that they acted not so much on Nikolai’s testimony as on their lawyers’ interpretation that Russian right-to-work laws had been violated by a four-year suspension. Because of similar laws in other countries, the maximum penalty now for a first-time steroid offender is a two-year suspension.

She returned to win the 100-meter hurdles in the 1996 Summer Olympics and the ’97 World Championships, outrunning the competition but not the whispers. It was as if she were wearing a scarlet “A” on her singlet, for anabolic.

Today, whether she gained a competitive edge through steroids seems irrelevant even to the women she has beaten. It is not life or death.

Breast cancer can be.

That was the diagnosis Engquist, 35, received March 17 from her doctors. In an interview here, Johan said doctors also told his wife that, although the cancer hadn’t spread to her lymph nodes, it was an aggressive strain that would require equally aggressive treatment.

“Her career was over for about four hours,” Johan said.

But upon further reflection and discussion with doctors, they decided that it would distract her from her ordeal, and perhaps enhance her chances for recovery, if she set a goal for herself, such as returning to the track in time to prepare for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

There was no thought at the time of returning in time for the World Championships this week in Seville. Even for a world champion hurdler, the obstacles created by the surgery on April 21 to remove her right breast and the chemotherapy treatments that began in May seemed too great.

Five days after her first three-hour chemotherapy session at a hospital, she worked out lightly. Six days later, she completed a full workout.

Because competitors cannot feel whole unless they compete, Engquist and her husband then agreed that she should at least plan for an abbreviated European season after her fourth chemotherapy session on July 15 before ruling out the World Championships.

She won her first meet back, in Stockholm on July 30, in 12.68 seconds. In three meets since, she has not won but ran one faster race, 12.67, in Monaco that convinced them she could at least make the finals here.

“She is probably at 50% of her level,” Johan said Tuesday.

On Wednesday at the World Championships, there were six finals. The most compelling event, however, was the first round of the women’s high hurdles. Of 41 competitors, Engquist had the fastest time, 12.62, and advanced easily to today’s second round.

“Sure, I am not the favorite here,” she said earlier this week. “I feel great. But it is not like Engquist.”

In recent months, she has talked almost nonstop in Sweden about her illness, to women’s groups and the media in an effort to spread breast cancer awareness and the importance of early detection. Here, though, she said she wants to concentrate on running her race.

There is a larger issue. Steroids have not been associated with breast cancer, as they have been with liver cancer, but oncologists say that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that there is a link. Perhaps Engquist’s case could provide valuable research.

That, however, is a subject for another day. I’m just glad that she’s in Seville. That is a sentiment shared by her competitors.

“I pray for her every day,” Devers said.

Engquist said she will not be truly satisfied unless she wins.

“I could sit here and say, ‘God, I have cancer; just being here is great,’ ” she said. “But that’s not me.”

Perhaps that sort of positive attitude, that competitive zeal, is valuable in the fight against cancer. Some doctors say it is. Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France less than two years after undergoing treatment for testicular cancer, says it is.

Then you have Kim Perrot, who had the same attributes going for her and didn’t make it, reminding us that cancer is still a monster.

Let’s hope Engquist’s story turns out like Armstrong’s. If it does, she promises to celebrate in Sydney by tossing her prosthesis into the stands.

Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com