Like most of the female gymnasts who become the darlings of Olympic years, she seems so young and tiny.
Shawn Johnson is 15 years old, stands 4-feet-8 and weighs 90 pounds. She looks like a kid who should be watching cartoons on the couch with a stuffed animal and a bowl of Froot Loops on her lap.
A year from now, she might be on magazine covers, morning news programs and late-night talk shows in the aftermath of the Beijing Olympics. Johnson easily won the all-around at the U.S. gymnastics championships two weeks ago, and Sunday she began pursuit of world championships medals in Stuttgart, Germany. Johnson and U.S. teammate Nastia Liukin got off to a good start Sunday, qualifying for the all-around finals.
“I think I’m pretty normal,” Johnson said the day after wrapping up her first senior U.S. title in San Jose, Calif. “I go to public school, I go to school dances, pep rallies and all that. I’d say I’m a normal kid, but of course I have this extra-special thing after.”
Her life figures to be anything but normal during the next 12 months.
In addition to the four-hour workouts at her home gym in West Des Moines, Iowa, there will be the monthly trips to the Karolyi Ranch in Texas to train with the national team. There will be magazine shoots and media appearances. The hype will be heavy.
It figures to get crazy.
“That’s what everybody’s telling us,” said Johnson’s father, Doug. “We’ve been able to handle everything so far. We can only imagine what it could get like. We’ll put our seat belts on and handle it.”
Johnson’s mother, Teri, tries not to think about it too much.
“I don’t know how ready I am for it, but we very methodically handle what comes our way when we have to,” she said.
Their daughter, a 10th-grader this fall, said it’s cool with her.
“I couldn’t be any more excited,” Shawn said. “Everything that it’s going to bring will just make the package 100 percent better. The attention and stuff, it’s cool to know people are finally realizing what we do and how hard we work.”
The Johnsons put Shawn in a dance class when she was 3 years old because she had a lot of energy and they wanted to give her an outlet in which she could burn it off.
“It was just an immediate hit for her,” Teri said. “I think she really should have been a boy, just very physical. She was able to do something that required effort and constant movement. It worked for her, and she loved it from Day One.”
When Johnson was 6, a new gym opened closer to home, so she began training there with Liang Qiao, a former Chinese gymnast who came to the U.S. in 1991 to coach at the University of Iowa. Qiao anglicizes his name as Chow.
“Chow from Day One told us she’s got, as he would say, ‘very much talent,”‘ Doug Johnson said. “I suppose it wasn’t until two years ago that we started thinking she could make it to this level.”
Chow was an alternate on the Chinese world championships team of 1989.
“After a couple years of training you feel like, ‘This kid is something extra, and she loves it,”‘ Chow said. “She loves to be in the gym, and she takes correction so well. Every day is a new day, every day she improves. She’s a very strong kid, physically and mentally.”
Johnson concedes there are days when she doesn’t love it so much.
“It’s a hard sport,” Johnson said. “Getting yourself up every morning and getting to the gym, it’s commitment and it’s dedication. Of course you go through really hard times, with really hard training, and you ask yourself why you’re doing it, but you keep your goals in front of you and it keeps you going.”
That seems like a rare admission for Johnson, who performs with apparent joy and has a ready, innocent smile away from the mats.
“I love what I do,” Johnson said. “I think that really plays a part in how I perform. Knowing I do something I love, it couldn’t be any more rewarding to me.”
