Shawn Johnson East

• 1. Introduction

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  Shawn Johnson East, an American gymnast born in 1992, reached the national team largely because her coach mailed a videotape in 2005. Liang Chow sent it to Marta Karolyi, the National Team Coordinator, with a single line attached: "I believe this kid will help the U.S. team." Karolyi thought the gesture was bold, remarking, "Wow, this coach is pretty confident."

  The bet paid off in ways that neither of them could have mapped out. Within a few years, the girl from Iowa stood on an Olympic podium in Beijing. She also won a television ballroom competition, endured a serious knee injury, and built a public life far beyond the gym. This documentary follows how a child who was once overlooked by the national program became one of the most recognizable athletes in America, and what she paid and gained along the way.

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• 2. An Iowa Childhood

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  Des Moines, Iowa, is where Shawn Machel Johnson was born on the 19th of January 1992, the daughter of Doug and Teri Johnson. Her parents signed her up for a gymnastics class at age 3 after they noticed her climbing cabinets and leaping off tables.

  At age 6, she became one of the first students of Liang Chow, who had just opened a gymnastics school in West Des Moines. He would coach her for nearly two decades. In 2012 she described him this way: "Chow is like a father to me, we've been with each other for so long."

  Her teenage years looked unusually ordinary for an elite gymnast. She attended Valley High School, made the honor roll, and enjoyed football games and dances. Through 2008, she kept her training to 25 hours a week, where the more typical elite schedule ran to 40.

  That lighter load makes the results that followed harder to explain, and the national scene was only beginning to notice them.

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• 3. The Overlooked Junior

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  At 12, Johnson competed in the Developmental Program National Championships, a Level 10 meet. She finished fourth in the all-around, first on beam and second on floor. Even so, the national program had not invited her to its training camps, and Chow had no contact with the national staff.

  Once she did qualify as a Junior International Elite, on her first attempt, attention came quickly. At the 2005 U.S. Classic she placed third. Then came the 2005 U.S. National Championships, where she fell from the beam on the first day and ended up tenth in the all-around.

  In 2006 she added a Jaeger on bars. She also learned two skills rated at the top difficulty level, a full-in back-out dismount off beam and a double-twisting double back on floor. That year she won the U.S. Junior National All-Around Championship with a score higher than any senior elite competitor posted.

  The next year she would become a senior, and the sport would find out how much she had been holding back.

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• 4. A Rookie Takes the World

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  Johnson turned senior in 2007 and arrived with a double-twisting double layout dismount off the uneven bars. She opened by winning the all-around at the American Cup, ahead of teammate Natasha Kelley. At the Pan American Games she took four golds, in the team, all-around, beam and bars, plus a silver on floor. At the national championships she beat Shayla Worley by more than three points.

  The World Championships came next, with Nastia Liukin, Shayla Worley, Alicia Sacramone, Ivana Hong and Samantha Peszek on the American roster. In qualifying she scored 16.250 on beam and 15.150 on floor. She added 15.175 on vault and 14.625 on bars, where she fell on her dismount. The U.S. finished first, and she advanced to the all-around, beam and floor finals.

  In the team final she was the only American to compete on all four events. She fell on her handspring-handspring-layout series on beam, but the team still won gold with 184.400 points, 0.950 ahead of China. It was only the second U.S. team gold at the Worlds.

  The all-around final brought a total of 61.875, which made her the fourth American woman to win the title. Her event finals were rougher. On beam she fell twice and finished last with a 14.475. On floor she stepped out of bounds on her first tumbling pass yet won gold with a 15.250, just ahead of Sacramone.

  Back in Iowa, Governor Chet Culver declared the 17th of October to be "Shawn Johnson Day" in the state.

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• 5. Chasing Liukin

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  Madison Square Garden hosted the 2008 American Cup on the 1st of March, and Johnson fell on her Amanar vault there, scoring 15.175. She led on vault, beam and floor yet still placed second overall. Nastia Liukin won gold because her uneven bars score was nearly a point higher.

  A week later in Jesolo, Italy, the U.S. faced Italy, Spain and Poland, and Johnson won the all-around with a 61.7. She posted the top marks on vault at 15.2, beam at 16.2 and floor at 15.0. Her floor win came even though she fell on her double-double mount.

  On the 7th of June 2008 she won the U.S. Visa Championships with a 127.5, one point clear of Liukin. She also took the floor title. Two weeks later in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she won the Olympic Trials all-around, again ahead of Liukin.

  Those two results earned both women immediate places on the Olympic team. The other four members had to wait for two additional selection camps.

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• 6. Beijing

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  Beijing in 2008 gave Johnson four events in the team competition, and the United States came away with silver. The individual all-around produced a second silver for her, with a score of 62.725. Her teammate and Olympic Village roommate Liukin won gold with 63.325.

  It was the first time American women had taken both the gold and silver in that event. Across Olympic history, only three other countries had done the same.

  On floor exercise she won silver, with Liukin collecting bronze. Her best moment came on balance beam, where she won gold and Liukin took the silver. She was the second American to win Olympic beam gold, after Shannon Miller in 1996.

  She had also qualified as second reserve for the uneven bars final, though she never competed in it.

  The weight behind that medal count would come out years later, in a confession about what she had been eating during that same stretch.

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• 7. Dancing and Celebrity

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  February 2009 brought a different kind of competition. Johnson joined ABC's Dancing with the Stars for season eight, partnered with professional Mark Ballas, who had won season six. The finale was the tightest in the show's history, and she beat Gilles Marini by less than 1 percent. At that point she was the youngest champion the show had crowned.

  The win required a move. In the spring of 2009 she left public school, and she and her mother relocated to Los Angeles. She finished high school in 2010 with a private tutor.

  On the 24th of September 2012 she returned for the all-star edition, season 15, with three-time champion Derek Hough. They finished second to Melissa Rycroft and Tony Dovolani. Judge Len Goodman called her "The No-Stress Express". Judge Bruno Tonioli dubbed the pair "The Incredibles" and called one routine "the best routine I have seen in 15 seasons in America of Dancing with the Stars and 9 in the UK of Strictly Come Dancing."

  The ballroom floor was only the start of a long run of screen appearances.

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• 8. Screens and Sponsors

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  Talk shows lined up in the weeks after Beijing. In August and September 2008 she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the Late Show with David Letterman and The Oprah Winfrey Show. She later appeared four times on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and three times on The Today Show.

  The humor came from odd places. In June 2009, The Onion ran a satirical news video reporting that she had been euthanized after breaking a leg. On the 13th of August 2009 she answered a question about the lyrics to "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" on the celebrity edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. That won $50,000 for her chosen charity, Blank Children's Hospital.

  Later credits ranged widely. She was the sixth contestant fired from the 2015 season of Celebrity Apprentice. In 2025 she entered Special Forces: World's Toughest Test with her husband and tied for first place with Gia Giudice.

  Commercial deals followed her too. The grocery chain Hy-Vee, based in her hometown of West Des Moines, ran ads featuring her before and during the Olympics. After the Games came Ortega's "Ortega makes my taco pop" and campaigns for McDonald's, CoverGirl and Secret deodorant. Her likeness appeared on a limited edition Cheerios box in January 2009. Reports of a Wheaties box never came true, and in 2011 she signed with Nike.

  She also led the Pledge of Allegiance at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, on the 28th of August.

  The 15th of April 2009 brought the AAU James E. Sullivan Award, given to the athlete who best represents leadership, character and sportsmanship. She was the first female gymnast to win it, and the third gymnast overall after Kurt Thomas and Paul Hamm.

  Popularity measures piled up alongside it. A scientific poll commissioned by Forbes magazine named her "America's Most-Liked Sports Figure" in 2009. AOL ranked her 27th on its list of the most searched females on the Internet that year. She won the ESPY for Best Female U.S. Olympian and a Teen Choice Award, the latter for the second consecutive year.

  Earlier, on the 7th of September 2007, she had received the Longines Prize for Elegance in Stuttgart, Germany. The honor came with a wristwatch, a trophy designed by the Swiss artist Piero Travaglini and a $5,000 check, and the decision was unanimous.

  A life-sized bronze sculpture of her stands at the Iowa Hall of Pride in Des Moines. On the 15th of August 2013, she and her 2007 Worlds teammates entered the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame. The International Gymnastics Hall of Fame followed in 2019.

  January 2010 brought a skiing accident that tore the ACL and MCL in her left knee. Surgery to reconstruct it followed the next week. By May she announced that she was returning to training, aiming for the 2012 Olympic team.

  Proof arrived in September 2010, when she released videos of her training. They showed an Amanar vault and a double-twisting Yurchenko, both into a pit, along with a full-twisting double layout on floor. Marta Karolyi was impressed enough to ask her to attend a national team camp in November 2010, earlier than Johnson had expected. Her knee still limited how much she could train.

  In February 2011 she rejoined the USA Senior National team, and in September she was named a non-traveling alternate for the World Championships team. October brought a spot on the Pan American Games team, where she won team gold and a silver on the uneven bars.

  The comeback ended on the 3rd of June 2012, when continuing trouble with the same knee led her to retire.

  The 25th of March 2009 started as another week of rehearsals for Dancing with the Stars. That day, a 34-year-old man named Robert O'Ryan jumped a fence and slipped onto the CBS lot, where he was arrested. Court documents said he carried guns, duct tape, zip ties and love letters addressed to Johnson, who was 17.

  He had traveled from Florida to California because he believed Johnson was speaking to him through the television by ESP. He thought the two of them would be together and have a child.

  Her family filed a restraining order. He faced felony stalking and burglary charges and two misdemeanor counts of carrying a loaded firearm in a vehicle. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed to Patton State Hospital for up to five years.

  In November 2015 Johnson revealed that she had struggled with an eating disorder in 2008, in the run-up to the Olympics. She said she had eaten about 700 calories a day.

  By then her personal life was changing. Andrew East, a professional football long snapper who played for the Vanderbilt Commodores, proposed on the 24th of July 2015 at Wrigley Field during a Chicago Cubs game. They married on the 16th of April 2016 in Franklin, Tennessee, and now live in Nashville. He later played for the Washington team then called the Redskins, in 2018.

  In October 2017 she shared in a YouTube video that she had been pregnant and suffered a miscarriage. Their daughter Drew Hazel was born on the 29th of October 2019, and their son Jett James on the 19th of July 2021. Barrett, known as Bear, followed on the 12th of December 2023.

  She has also told her story in print. A book of photographs and quotes came out in December 2008. Winning Balance, about love, faith and life after elite gymnastics, followed in June 2012. In June 2016 she published a young adult novel, The Flip Side, about a young gymnast torn between Olympic gold and a normal teenage life.

  In February 2022, the couple joined the ownership group of Angel City FC in the National Women's Soccer League.

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