Liang Chow, Coach of Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, is the newest coach on the Nike team.

Chow is very proud of the endorsement and alongside

Johnson,wore his Nike apparel proudly at the 2011 Visa U.S. Gymnastics Championships.  Chow will visit the exclusive Nike Campus with Shawn on November 2, 2011.

Liang Chow was born and raised in China and competed for the Chinese national gymnastics team before moving to Iowa in the early 1990s.

He earned a bronze medal for China at the 1989 World Championships.

As a co-captain of the Chinese National Gymnastics Team, he led his country to 36 international gold medals over his athletic career.

Chow became a gymnast at age 5, won all-around gold in his first ever gymnastics meet, and by the age of 10, he was a national champion.

His career peaked in 1990 when he was named the All-Around Master Champion at the Gymnastics World Cup at the age of 22. With younger gymnasts quickly upcoming in China, Chow decided to retire.  He accepted a full-ride scholarship to study English in Iowa, and moved to the United States.

Coach Chow coaches as a husband and wife team with Liwen Zhaung. The couple met in the late 1980s when they were both gymnasts on the Chinese National Team. Natives of Beijing, the host city for the 2008 Olympics, their passion for gymnastics led them to Iowa and to coach Olympian Shawn Johnson.

Liang Chow and wife Liwen Zhaung own and operate Chow’s Gymnastics and Dance Institute in West Des Moines, Iowa, training center of future Olympians.

2008 Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, right, listens to coach Liang Chow during a workout session for the CoverGirl Classic gymnastics event Friday, July 22, 2011 in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

By Juliet Macur, The New York Times

BEIJING — In her final chance for a gold medal at these Olympics, Shawn Johnson hopped up on the balance beam and sparkled in her blue and red leotard.

Three times, she had finished second at these Games. But for Johnson, the 16-year-old with the blinding smile, that would not be enough.

So she buried her disappointment and hit her routine, sticking to the beam on each landing, as if her feet had glue on them. Afterward, she hugged her competitors from China, then waited for the final two gymnasts to perform.

Neither of them would score higher than Johnson’s 16.225.

On the arena floor, Johnson melted into her coach, Liang Qiao, for a big bear hug. She had dreamed of giving him a gold medal here in his hometown and finally, on the last day of gymnastics competition, she had done it.

“I could tell by the way that he hugged me and the look on his face that he was more proud of me than he’s ever been,” she said. “I really feel like I made him proud.”

Johnson, a sparkplug of a gymnast from West Des Moines, Iowa, already had three silver medals from this Olympics before competing Tuesday, the last day of gymnastics competition.  Her goal Tuesday was to climb that last step and win the gold.

“You don’t train for silver,” she said last week.

Still, Johnson kept smiling through the next several days, as her Olympics came to a close.

Though she had considered retiring after these Olympics, the joy she has felt here has enticed her to stick around for another four years, she said.

For US women’s gymnastics coach Qiao Liang, it’s good to be home.

Qiao, a Beijing native and former Asian champion, has returned to his hometown for the Olympics after an absence of 14 years.

“It’s great to be back,” Qiao said during the US team’s press conference at the Main Press Center on Thursday.

“I’ve seen a lot of my former teammates and friends. When I go to the arena, it seems that everybody knows me. It’s a great feeling.”

Qiao took up gymnastics at age 5. During the 1980s, he was one of the star gymnasts on the Chinese national team, winning several titles at National Games, Asian Games and World Cup events.

He retired after the 1990 Asian Games and moved to the US, where he received a scholarship at the University of Iowa.

“I stayed on the national team for 10 years and I had a great time there. I had a good relationship with my coaches and teammates. But after I retired, I thought I was too young to stay on the team as a coach,” he said.

“The world was so big and I felt I wanted to take advantage of other opportunities.”

Qiao opened a gymnastics studio in Iowa and has already become one of the top gymnastics coaches in the US. He has produced 234 state winners and several national champions, including star gymnast Shawn Johnson.

The 16-year-old Johnson started training with Qiao when she was 6. She made her debut in international competition last year and won every competition she entered.

She claimed four gold medals at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, her first as a senior gymnast. Later, she took two individual titles in floor and all-around and led the US women to the team title at the World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany.

For 14 years, Qiao Liang has been busy with his gymnastics school and has had no time to plan a trip home.

“I have been waiting for the right time to come back. It’s a great honor to come back as a US head coach,” he said.

At the Beijing Games, Qiao will help the US team, China’s biggest rival, try to fulfill its Olympic dream.

“Of course we want to take the team title,” Qiao told China Daily. “We are the defending world champion and the whole team has become more mature in the past year.

“China also has a very strong team, but we are up to the challenge. I believe this will be a fantastic competition to watch.”

By JULIET MACUR
June 19. 2008

PHILADELPHIA — When the floodwaters rose in Iowa last week and the bloated Raccoon River filled Chow’s Gymnastics and Dance Institute with water that was knee deep, Shawn Johnson suddenly was a gymnast with no gym.

Liang Chow, her coach and the gym’s owner, immediately gave her a pep talk.

“I said, ‘Don’t be worried about this; we will put things back together,’ ” Liang said Tuesday, describing his conversation with Johnson, the favorite to win the all-around at the Beijing Olympics. “We also talked to her parents to make sure she was not panicking.”

The United States Olympic gymnastics trials were less than a week away, and Johnson’s emotions were roiling. But there was no time to be upset. There was an Olympic team to make and an Olympic gold medal to win. So it did not take long for Johnson, a 16-year-old from West Des Moines, to bounce back.

While her gym was being repaired, she worked out at Iowa State University, about 30 miles from her home. On Wednesday, the day before the Olympic trials were set to begin, she sounded as confident as ever. “It was kind of scary, but I think it made me stronger because I had to train at a different gym,” said Johnson, the reigning world champion in the all-around. “Now I think I can handle anything.”

Already, Johnson said, she is dreaming of the moment her name will be called Sunday night at the Wachovia Center here. At least two women will be named to the Olympic team. “I would just cry,” she said of that moment, which would come at the conclusion of a four-day competition involving men and women.

The top two finishers in the all-around, presumably Johnson and Nastia Liukin, automatically earn a spot on the six-member team headed to Beijing. The others will be chosen by a committee headed by Martha Karolyi, the women’s national team coordinator, at a training camp July 20.

Johnson is also considered a lock for the United States team, as is Liukin, who is the only gymnast to beat Johnson in the all-around since Johnson began competing at the senior level last year. Although their rivalry is likely to be one of the hottest topics in Beijing, the two are close friends.

Liukin, who lives in Parker, Tex., grabbed her iPhone on Tuesday to read the text message she sent Johnson after hearing about the floods.

The message said: “Just wanted to make sure you are safe. I’m sorry to hear about the flooding. I hope everything is O.K. Let me know if there’s anything we can do. I know we are far away, but I’m here for you. Love you.” Johnson’s return text message also ended with a “love you.”

“Of all the weeks in the year, out of all the years, why did it have to happen to her now?” Liukin said of the flooding. “Deep down, it’s probably very hard for her, but I think she is a real strong person and that she’ll be O.K.”

By the time Liukin sent her text message to Johnson, Liang, gymnastics officials and a legion of others had already mobilized to help Johnson stay on track for the Olympics.

USA Gymnastics officials called Iowa State to see if Johnson could train there. At least 100 volunteers arrived at Liang’s gym in West Des Moines to rip out the damaged floors, pick mud off the walls and prepare the gym for Johnson’s return.

Johnson was back in the gym by Sunday, working out in a construction zone. While she trained on the uneven bars, there were unfinished concrete floors all around her. While she was on the balance beam, volunteers were putting in a new wooden floor just feet away. Click to Read the Full Article: After Being Displaced by Flooding, Top U.S. Gymnast Springs Back for Trials- New York Times

Her father, Doug, had paid $2,000 for the wood and helped install the new flooring, she said. Doug Johnson, a carpenter, tore his right biceps during that process and will have surgery next week.

None of that work was supposed to happen, said Liang, because the floodwaters were supposed to stay away from his gym. A city engineer told him that his gym would be safe, Liang said.

Still, Liang was cautious. Last Thursday, he and volunteers moved most of his gymnastics equipment to the second floor of the gym. They filled sandbags and placed them around the building.

When Liang went home after midnight, he slept soundly, thinking his gym had been spared. The next day, though, he and Johnson arrived to find fish swimming in the parking lot. Inside, parts of the floors were floating atop what had become an indoor pool.

By the end of the week, everything should be replaced and rebuilt, without any cost to him, said Liang, who has no flood insurance.

“I haven’t paid a penny yet,” he said. “What everyone has done for me and for Shawn, it just touches my heart.”

Shawn Johnson should have been able to relax. She is, after all, the 16-year-old poster child for the world champion U.S. women’s gymnastics team, the winner of three golds, including the all-around title, in Stuttgart, Germany, last September. With her big brown eyes and guileless smile, she’s a hometown hero in Des Moines, where a local car dealer gave her the keys to a new Land Rover for her birthday in January. Not that Johnson needed the handout — she has endorsement contracts with Adidas, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Hy-Vee supermarkets, among others. An A student at Valley High in West Des Moines, the sophomore has her sights set on someday attending an Ivy League college. And if that isn’t enough, the diminutive (4′ 9″, 94 pounds) Johnson has already been cast in bronze, with the life-sized statue to be displayed in the Iowa Hall of Pride in Des Moines, opposite the black-and-white photos of Mamie Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover and Andy Williams. All this comes before the Beijing Olympics, at which Johnson hopes to become the third American woman, after Mary Lou Retton and Carly Patterson, to win an Olympic all-around gold. The world, it would seem, is the young lady’s oyster.

But Johnson didn’t see it that way on this February night. With Beijing approaching and 2007 behind her, that old devil Doubt had wheedled its way into her psyche. She was at the well-known “ranch” — Bela and Martha Karolyi’s national-team training center 90 minutes north of Houston — along with dozens of other Olympic hopefuls who are brought there monthly to show off routines and sharpen their skills under the critical eye of Martha, the team coordinator. No one is guaranteed a ticket to Beijing, not even a world champion.

So Johnson couldn’t sleep. In 2007 she’d won every competition she had entered: the American Cup, the American Classic, the Pan Am Games, the national and the world championships. But now it was a new year. At 12:30 a.m. she sat up in her bed, grabbed her cellphone and typed out a poem. This is how she relieves stress: with creative spurts of writing, drawing or painting. “There are no guidelines to writing,” she says. “It lets me be free and do whatever I want. I let it all out.”

The activity is her escape from gymnastics, with its demands of precision and the pursuit of perfection, its exhaustively rehearsed and regimented routines. That night Johnson cranked out 33 lines of rhyming couplets in 10 minutes, spilling her doubts onto the tiny screen. The poem dealt with the fear of losing and the occasional impulse to give up the sport.

When behind the scenes you crumbled and prayed
For it all to simply just go away.
The doubt and regrets of what you went through
Sometimes just made you want to give it to
The next girl in line.….

She texted the poem to her mother, Teri, an accounting clerk for the West Des Moines school system, before going to sleep. Teri is frequently surprised and moved by what Shawn writes. “I don’t know where her artistic side comes from,” Teri says. “She’s got a good little soul.”

You remember the times when you thought to give up
But could never find a reason to disrupt
Anything and everything you had given to the sport
The heart’s desire and all the support.

“Every day before practice, I reread it,” Shawn says. “Writing that poem released a lot of the pressure. World champion is such a huge title to live up to.”

Teri and Doug Johnson, an independent contractor specializing in interior trim work, didn’t push Shawn up the gymnastics ladder. Quite the opposite. Every time Shawn’s coach, Liang Chow, told Teri he wanted to advance Shawn a level, Teri asked him to reconsider. “Chow has told me I’m the only mom who asked him to hold her daughter back,” Teri says. “I thought she’d be better off competing against kids her own age.”

Chow knew better. He grew up in Beijing, which is why Teri believes destiny has been at work. “I have a gut feeling they were supposed to meet and do this thing,” she says. “It’s just been too easy. We haven’t done anything to make this happen.”

A member of the bronze-medal-winning Chinese national team at the 1989 world championships, Chow accepted a scholarship two years later to a place he’d never been, the University of Iowa, to study English and help coach the gymnastics teams. In doing so, he left behind a world of relative wealth and privilege for the spartan life of an American college student. “I was pretty famous in China,” says Chow, who was making more money than his father, a senior electrician. “He was a pretty tough guy. I’d never seen him cry before, but he cried when I left.”

Chow was 23 when he arrived in Iowa City with a suitcase and a kindergartner’s grasp of English, but he relished the adventure. “Gymnastics trained me, not just for gold medals, but for life,” he says. “There is no fear in gymnastics. If you can do a double backflip, you can do anything. It was hard at first, but later on, Iowa seemed like heaven to me. I love this country and this system because if you have the talent and the knowledge, you can use it.”

Two years later he married his girlfriend, Liwen Zhuang, a member of a Chinese professional gymnastics team, in Beijing. By 1998 they’d saved enough money to pursue his dream of running his own gym, and he looked into facilities that were for sale in Los Angeles and Seattle. In the end, though, they opened Chow’s Gymnastics in West Des Moines, just a few blocks from the Johnsons’ house. “I’m from the big city,” Chow says, “but I don’t really like big cities.”

Chow’s had been open only two months when six-year-old Shawn bounced in. “From Day One we realized this kid was really special, because she loves learning and wants to reach her potential,” says Chow. “She’s a hard worker and handles pressure really well. She loves to show off for the cameras and the big crowd.”

Chow and Zhuang coach in the Chinese style of their upbringing. Mutual respect is their guiding principle. Gymnasts show up on time or early, and if anyone rolls her eyes or complains, she is told to stand and watch. “It’s almost like shunning,” says Shawn. No crying is tolerated, no hissy fits, as she calls the frustration-fueled tantrums that sometimes occur in a gym. Throughout workouts, Chow wears a broad smile of delight and encouragement. “He tells them all the same thing: ‘You’re here to have fun,’ ” says Doug Johnson. “If Chow’s not laughing or smiling, he’s mad. But I’ve never heard him yell. He just gives them that look.”

Shawn’s skills have benefited from this nontraditional approach. “I’ve been told I’m a mix [of gymnastics styles],” Shawn says. “I have the precision and technique people admire in the Chinese and the power that’s typical of American gymnasts. It makes me stand out.”

Johnson has remained remarkably injury-free for a top gymnast, which her parents also credit to Chow’s coaching techniques. At his facility the gymnasts work out just once a day, from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m. — most top gymnasts train twice a day for a total of six or seven hours — and if Johnson feels a muscle strain or soreness, Chow believes in applying heat to the affected area, as is done in China, not ice. That puts him at odds with U.S. team doctors and trainers, but Johnson doesn’t think twice about whose advice to follow. “I’ve been with Chow since I was six, and I’ve trusted him with my life,” she says. “He’s like my second dad.”

The training schedule also allows her to attend a public school. Even in an Olympic year she has kept a close-to-regular academic schedule, taking biology, geometry, French and modern American literature. (Next year she hopes to make up for this relatively light load by taking seven courses each semester.) “Her peers give her support but also keep her humble,” says Karla Hardy, Johnson’s guidance counselor. “She’s so conscientious and highly motivated, and has an incredible zest for learning. She’ll have her pick of Ivy League colleges.”

First, though, there’s Beijing, a dream Johnson has harbored since 2003. That was the year Zhuang, who coaches Johnson on the balance beam, brought back a commemorative gold medal from a trip to China. The first member of Chow’s Gymnastics to win a national title, the team was told, would get to keep it. Shawn, age 12, went to junior Olympic nationals the next year and won the beam. The commemorative medal, she hopes, will be replaced by a real one come August.

Shawn knows what it will mean to Chow to return to Beijing, where he hasn’t been in nearly 15 years, as the coach of the world champion. “He hasn’t said anything,” she says. “He’d never put that kind of pressure on me. But after I won in Stuttgart, he told me how honored he was to be my coach, and that was the first time I ever saw him cry.”

So she takes nothing for granted. She listens, works and trusts in the wisdom of her Chinese coach. And when the pressure mounts, she rereads the poem that she wrote that night in February.

The sky is its limits —
And with the moon as its guide,
As no one could ever predict how high
One could travel with the hard work put in
To truly become a Champion.