Shawn Johnson glides through a conference room at Manhattan’s Sentry Center with grace and beauty. At the age of 20, she’s an Olympic gold medal winner, a “Dancing With the Stars” champion, and an inspiration and hero to thousands of young gymnasts across the country. As I watch her enter the room, shaking hands and smiling for photographs as she’s done so many thousands of times before, I look at her left knee.
It’s the elephant in every room she struts into these days.
“How’s it doing?” I ask, pointing to the knee that will ultimately make or break her 2012 Olympic dreams.
“It’s doing well,” she smiles with a nod. “Today,” she says. “Today, it’s doing well.”
Johnson, the winner of a gold and three silvers in Beijing in 2008, was expected to lead the US women’s gymnastics team to glory — the coveted all-around team gold it hasn’t won since 1996 — in London in 2012. But two years ago she tore her ACL in her left knee during a ski trip with friends. She was celebrating her 18th birthday, she took a freak fall on an easy hill, and her safety release didn’t come off. “My ski got caught in the snow, I fell over my knee and basically tore everything. It was awful.”
In an instant, the sure thing that was Shawn Johnson — four years older, four years wiser, four years better than she was in China — leading her team on to the mat in 2012 became a lot less guaranteed.
Now, she’s fighting for a spot on the squad. There are younger, hungry competitors — 16-year-old Jordyn Wieber, for one — who the media has already jumped all over in anticipation of the games. Whereas four years ago when she was the story and face of US gymnastics, now she’s not exactly the end-all, be-all when it comes to media coverage surrounding the team.
Shawn Johnson’s not done, though. Hardly. (read more)
