Balanced, beaming

Tumblers all in place for gymnast Johnson

The stars seem to be aligned for high schooler Shawn Johnson to follow in some famous footsteps at this summer's Olympics. (charles rex arbogast/Associated Press)

It's not as if there was a master plan taped to the side of the balance beam a decade ago. Shawn Johnson turned up at the gym one day when she was 3 and has been in mid-air ever since.

"I never started gymnastics thinking I wanted to become an Olympian," says Johnson, who'll begin defense of her US women's title Thursday evening at Boston University's Agganis Arena. "It was always just my passion and my love."

Now, a few million handstands and twists and saltos later, the 16-year-old blonde mainspring from West Des Moines, Iowa, is on top of the world, the best gymnast on the planet's best team, the favorite to win the gold medal in the all-around at this summer's Games in Beijing.

Even in a sport where great leaps upward are common, Johnson's ascent has been remarkable. From junior to senior national titlist in one year, then from US to world champion in three weeks. It's all been as fast and blurry as a headlong dash down a vaulting runway, and there are times when Johnson has wondered what she signed on for.

"I don't think anyone ever knows what they're getting themselves into," she says. "For me, it was just the thrill of the ride. It's been the best thing I've ever done."

Not that the ride hasn't had its bumpy stretches.

"You remember the struggles and pain you had/When all the good had turned to bad," Johnson mused in the "Champion" poem she wrote last winter. "When behind the scenes you crumbled and prayed/For it all to simply just go away."

Once the calendar turned over, Johnson began feeling the swirl and the squeeze that comes with being America's Girl in the Olympic year. Mary Lou Retton, Kim Zmeskal, Shannon Miller, and Carly Patterson can tell you about all that, about the teetering feeling that comes from competing in a sport in which medals are decided by a thousandth of a point and where your feet rarely are on the ground.

Nothing is guaranteed for Johnson, not even making the team in the toughest Olympic year to do it since the Magnificent 7 won gold in 1996. Of the two dozen competitors in the two-day senior event here, 10 are global medalists.

Nastia Liukin, the two-time former champion who'll be Johnson's primary rival this week, already has nine world medals in her trophy case.

Winchester's Alicia Sacramone, the Brown sophomore who captained last year's gold-medal squad, has seven. Chellsie Memmel is a former world all-around champ.

"I think we're the strongest team probably in history," reckons Johnson. "I don't think there'll be anyone that can beat us."

The Americans will be leaving home several gymnasts who'd be stars on any other team at the Games. Only the top half of this week's finishers will go to Philadelphia for next month's Olympic trials, where just the top two in the all-around are assured of Beijing tickets.

The other four will be chosen later at the traditional Houston boot camp, which the gymnasts will tell you is tougher and tenser than the trials. Odds are that Johnson will be one of the top two, both here and in Philadelphia, but she says she's not obsessing about it.

"We don't talk about placements or scores," says Johnson, who easily won the title last year in San Jose, Calif. "The biggest thing is to make the team. Just get out there like any other competition, have fun and defend my title."

Mandatory normalcy
The Olympics may be her dream, but they are not her life. Johnson is the world's best gymnast, but she's still only midway through high school. When she was in New York in March for the American Cup, she brought along her homework.

"I basically have two separate lives," Johnson says. "When I'm at school, people see me as a normal teenaged Shawn Johnson. When I'm out of school, I'm a gymnast again."

Johnson, whose father is a carpenter and mother an accounting clerk for the West Des Moines school system, is a model of Midwestern sense and sensibility.

"My parents think it's mandatory that I lead a normal life," she says. "They're just the most normal parents there are. They never pushed me to do anything I didn't want to."

Gymnastics seemed a natural outlet for a daughter who was walking at nine months (having skipped crawling) and doing pull-ups in her playpen. "The wild child just needed something to do," said mother Teri.

By age 6, Johnson was tearing around Chow's Gymnastics & Dance Institute, run by Qiao Liang, the former Chinese national team cocaptain who'd attended the University of Iowa after emigrating and who coached the men's and women's varsities for seven years.

"I definitely think something happened when I first met Chow and Li [wife Zhuang Liwen]," Johnson says. "They saw something special in me. They saw that if I worked hard enough, that I could achieve my dreams."

Her first junior nationals in 2005 were wobbly - Johnson fell on beam and floor on the first day and ended up 10th. But she came back a year later and blew off the roof, claiming the title with a score that would have won the senior event.

It was a jaw-dropping breakthrough and it quickly moved Johnson into the fast lane. Retton, who draped the gold medal around her neck, knew that Johnson had the goods and offered up a bit of gilded wisdom.

"She has always told me to stick with it and have fun and make sure that you follow your heart," says Johnson, who says that Retton (now the mother of four daughters) "is the nicest lady I've ever met."

'A perfect fit'
Johnson's heart told her to try to maintain balance - to be the best gymnast that she could be without turning her life inside-out. That meant not moving to a more competitive gym a thousand miles away and not being home-schooled. Johnson goes to Valley High School. She goes to football games. She goes shopping with her friends. Last month, she went to the prom.

Johnson is very much like the rest of her classmates. She just happens to be able to stick a 2 1/2 layout twisting Yurchenko.

"Public school has always been my fallback from gymnastics," Johnson says. "I'm able to go to school during the day and have that place where I don't have to think about gymnastics all the time. It gives me another world that keeps me calm and grounded and normal."

Johnson is the athlete whom USA Gymnastics was thinking about two quadrennia ago when the federation emphasized local training, enhanced by fly-in specialists and boot camps before big meets. She never considered moving out of state.

"It never occurred to me," she says. "I had found Chow and Li and they were five minutes away from home and it was a perfect fit."

The heartland works for her. Johnson is up early, breakfasts on yogurt and scrambled eggs, does some studying and goes to school from 8 to noon. After a lunchtime wrap or salad and some more bookwork, she goes to the gym from 2:30 to 6:30, then heads home for a dinner of chicken or fish with vegetables and more homework.

Except for the four hours she devotes to running and flipping, Johnson is like any other member of the Class of 2010.

"Iowa is the best place ever," she says. "It's the most supportive and caring place that I could possibly be at. You know you have people to go home to who will be part of you."

Still, Johnson can't ever be the generic corn-fed kid again. After she won the world title, the governor declared Oct. 17 "Shawn Johnson Day" and a life-sized (as in 4 feet 9 inches, 94 pounds) bronze statue of her on balance beam is in the works for the Iowa Hall of Pride. Johnson already has a bunch of sponsors, most notably Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Adidas, and she hasn't even been to Olympus.

Yet Johnson has already made her mark merely by winning a world title, which only countrywomen Zmeskal, Miller, and Memmel had managed.

"I wanted to go out, have fun, and have the time of my life," she says. "And I did."

Though her sturdy exuberance reminds some observers of Zmeskal and others of Retton, Johnson doesn't want to work off an established template.

"It's an honor to have someone make a comparison, but I'm in this sport to become the next Shawn Johnson," she says.

"I'm not here to copy or become someone else. I want to be my own person and make history because I'm being me and no one else."

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com