NEW YORK - The Olympic trials are still nearly four months off, but Shawn Johnson already is feeling the gym walls closing in. "It's starting to get really nerve-racking," the planet's best female gymnast was saying yesterday afternoon, surrounded by cameras and microphones and tape recorders and notepads on the floor of Madison Square Garden.
The season starts here in earnest this morning, when the 16-year-old Johnson will defend her American Cup title against several of the same women whom she'll be battling for a place on the team for Beijing this summer. She can talk about the Chinese and the Romanians and the Russians, but unless Johnson makes the squad, it's all chitchat.
No other US federation puts its athletes through such a physical and emotional grinder to get to the Games as gymnastics does its women. There's the US championships (in Boston in June), from where the top 12 proceed to the Olympic trials in Philadelphia two weeks later.
Only the top two at trials are guaranteed places on the team. The other four may not be picked until after the final selection camp in Houston, where the candidates go head to head for five brutal days.
"It's constantly in your head," said Johnson. "You're constantly thinking about it, but you try not to let it affect you. You just do your normal stuff. You go to the gym every day and work out. You try to stay as calm as possible and do everything you can to get there."
That's easier for her to do back home in West Des Moines, Iowa, whose population can fit into Yankee Stadium. But whenever she turns up at a major event with her teammates/competitors, Johnson is going to be asked what it's like to be The Girl, America's latest ponytailed sensation and gold-medal hope, and the whirl around her will become louder and faster.
"Some people have warned me about it and given me some little tidbits," she said. "But I'm up for everything, and I can't wait to see what this year has in store."
The last year was pure fantasy - how do you win the global all-around title in your first season up from juniors? But Johnson did, starting with the American Cup, then the US championships and, finally, the world meet in Germany, where she earned three gold medals, including the team (the first for the Americans overseas) and the floor exercise.
"It definitely happened a lot faster than I would ever have imagined," Johnson said. "I don't think I ever imagined that it would happen. Last year went by so fast. It feels like yesterday that I was at the American Cup. It's crazy to think about everything that's happened since."
Not that gymnastics insiders were surprised. They already were talking about Johnson the year after the last Olympics, when she was 13. "I watched when she was a junior winning everything," Mary Lou Retton said yesterday. "Everybody was waiting for her."
Johnson had it all - explosiveness and daring and flair and personality. She was, coach Bela Karolyi said, the second coming of Kim Zmeskal. Zmeskal was The Girl in 1992, the defending world champion whose face was on the cover of Time and Newsweek. She went to Barcelona as the Olympic favorite, stepped out of bounds on the floor, her first event in the all-around final, and watched her medal hopes vanish.
Zmeskal never got another chance. She tore up a knee before the 1996 Games, then an Achilles' before 2000. This is a sport in which your moment comes and goes in a flash. Coming into 1984, Dianne Durham was The Girl. She didn't make the team and Retton went on to win the gold in Los Angeles and ended up on a Wheaties box.
"I remember that there was a mental switch that year," said Retton. "A light turned on. Something inside of me said, 'OK, this is it.' I wanted to make every moment count. I'm hoping that switch will turn on for Shawn. Give it your all. You don't want to be my age and have regrets, saying I wish I'd done that."
This is a slippery, teetering, hang-on-for-dear-life enterprise. In Athens, Paul Hamm went from first to 12th to first, just like that. Even if Johnson makes the team, and she certainly should, she might not be The Girl going into Beijing. It could be Nastia Liukin, the two-time former US champ who has already won nine world medals, tying Shannon Miller's domestic record. "It will be very difficult between Shawn and Nastia," predicted Karolyi.
They'll go head to head here today, then again in Boston, then again in Philadelphia, then again in selection camp, then again in Beijing. Right now, from Johnson's vantage point on Seventh Avenue, Beijing might as well be the moon. "I've never been to China," she said. "It's supposed to be an amazing country."
John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com.
