Gymnast Julie Zetlin is proud to be representing Team USA in London. Zetlin will be competing for a medal in rhythmic gymnastics. Time For Kids caught up with Zetlin for a quick lesson at the Road to London event in New York City. Watch the interview here.

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.

She admits her knee still isn’t 100 percent, but America’s sweetheart from four summers ago is excited for the US team Olympic Trials in June.

“It’s been a huge challenge,” Johnson adds as we chat in a New York City conference room during Procter & Gamble’s “Thank You, Mom” event. “This is the first time in my entire career that I’ve been proven to be mortal. And guess what? It turns out that I’m human. I was beginning to think for a while there that I was a machine. But, I’m breakable. I’m breakable like everyone else.”

She’s only 20, but she sounds like a wise, old sage. She’s done media since she was 14, and she’s been answering questions about her knee for months. But there’s a fragility in Shawn Johnson’s responses on this rainy Tuesday afternoon in the Big Apple. As comfortable as she might seem with a reporter’s recorder 3 inches from her face, there’s a real possibility that her brightest Olympic days are behind her; a thing of the past. If she doesn’t qualify for the team in June, she’ll be a long shot to make the squad at the age of 24 in 2016.

She knows that. She’s aware of her window.

But there’s no sign of duress or fear. Johnson’s approaching June’s trials with a completely different mentality than she did on her first go-around.

“I’m getting stronger on a daily basis. I’m excited for June. This time around, I’ve taken a whole new approach and mentality. This isn’t the end-all, be-all. I’m in it for fun. I’m having fun, and I want to keep having fun. It’s not just about me, it’s about the team. And whether I make it or not, I’ve already come to terms with either outcome. It’s about Team USA and getting that gold.”

I try to spot a moment — a fraction of a second, really — where she goes off message, but there’s no hesitation. She isn’t BS-ing a BS artist. She actually means this.

“I’ll do what I can, either way,” she says with a nod. “I’ve played more of a mentor role than anything else this time around, and that’s crazy, because last time, I was ‘The Baby.’ But at the (Pan-American Games), I was the team leader and got to wrap my arms around those girls. They look up to me in a way that I looked up to the older girls in Beijing. I’ll offer up any of my help or guidance in any way the team needs, regardless of whether I’m competing or not.”

But don’t get her wrong — she does want to compete. It’s that burning desire that has her up at 5 a.m. every day training. It’s that passion that fueled her decision to train with former Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson in Dallas.

“I want to be there, of course,” she says with the smile quickly disappearing from her face. “We have unfinished business. We’re going for the gold.”

As we wrap up the interview, I watch Johnson walk away with a suspicious eye. I’m looking for a limp. I’m looking for a break in her gait. I’m looking for any sign of injury.

But I don’t see anything.

Nothing’s slowing Shawn Johnson down.

She may, indeed, be breakable, but she’s even stronger than she was in 2008. Mentally, she’s all there. As she noted in our conversation, she “gets it,” now.

“The adversity of the injury’s only made me a better athlete. I see it all differently now. I’m excited by the challenge. I’m ready.”

Watch out, world.

America’s sweetheart is ready to prove a lot of doubters wrong.

Bleacher Report

Olympic glory is a one-shot deal and, as such, the Games make a perfect stage for clutch performances.

For most athletes, you go. You take your result, good or bad. You accept that four years from now someone younger, faster and stronger will have relegated you to competitive obsolescence. Imagine then the strength of mind it takes to perform at one’s best in the context of such finality.

Consider what the following American athletes had to overcome, both within and without, to become their very best selves when the moment demanded it.

Paul Hamm
Although it has been obscured in later years by the scoring controversy over his gold medal, there’s no denying Paul Hamm’s resolve in the most crucial moments of the 2004 men’s gymnastics individual all-around competition.

After a spectacular fall on the vault, Hamm stood 12th with just two rotations left. The podium was a long shot, much less Olympic gold.

Hope resurfaced after Hamm nailed his parallel bar routine. Perhaps Hamm could somehow manage a bronze.

Entering the final apparatus, NBC play-by-play announcer Al Trautwig set the stakes.

“If he could pull a medal out of this, it would be an amazing comeback.”

It was an ambitious hypothetical, one Hamm would soon render into an understatement.

With a sterling 9.837 on the high bar, he shot past South Koreans Yang Tae-Young and Kim Dae-Eun, winning the all-around title by the smallest margin in Olympic history.

The controversy opened a Pandora’s box of added questions…  All that buzz, however, misses the point.

Hamm had pulled off the two greatest routines of his career mere moments after his most public and painful failure.

Gold medal or not, that right there deserves some love.

CBS News, CBS Sunday Morning

American gymnast Shawn Johnson was a Golden Girl at the 2008 Olympics – and she hopes to repeat that performance at this summer’s games in London.

Flying through the air makes her feel “like you’re invincible. Makes you feel like Superman and gives you a thrill. It’s like an adrenaline rush.”

It’s obvious that Shawn Johnson loves gymnastics, a sport she’s very good at: “It’s what I live for.”

At the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, she stuck her landings and struck gold on the balance beam, and additionally won three silver medals.

Now at age 20 – young by life standards, not so young for a gymnast – she’s hoping to compete in this summer’s London Games.

“A lot of the kids in here are 10 – so are you kind of like the old lady of this gym?” asked Rocca.

“Pretty much. I’m the grandma,” she laughed. “I’ve been through it and they’re, like, ‘Oh, she’s so old. How could she still do it?’”

Johnson still does it – every morning in her hometown of West Des Moines, Iowa, under the watchful eye of her longtime coach Liang Chow.

She describes the gym as her second home: “Definitely. If not my first home. I’ve almost spent more time here than I do at my actual home.”

If Shawn feels at home at the gym, that may be because her mom Teri Johnson has spent so much time there.

For eight years, while Shawn was growing up, Teri perched, watching – four hours a day, six days a week for eight years while Shawn was growing up.

“I kind of always felt like if I wasn’t here I didn’t get to see her that day,” Teri said.

“We weren’t hanging out, but just having her here, I felt connected,” Shawn said. “I felt like, ‘Okay, you know, my mom’s still here. I still get to see her.’”

And mother and daughter agree on whose decision this whole gymnastics thing was:

“When I would come home and she’d be, like, ‘Are you sure you want to do it? Are you sure you don’t want to go try soccer?’” said Shawn. “I’d be, like, ‘No. You know, I love it. I love the hard work. I just want you there to support me.”

Parents Teri and Doug brought their only child to a gymnastics studio because they had trouble keeping up with her.

In 1998, Shawn and Teri met coach Chow, a former gymnast from China who came to Iowa to study English.

Chow told Rocca when he first met Shawn he didn’t notice any spark: “No, did not think all that. Nobody can see that far. If somebody or any coach tells you, ‘I see at six years old, she’ll be Olympian,’ that’s not a truth. Nobody can see that far.”

Shawn took to it naturally. Talent plus a fierce will propelled her. By 2008, Johnson was the reigning world champion when she arrived in Beijing, far from home. And yet . . .

“I was on the beam in the Beijing Olympics, the farthest point in the arena away from my parents on the other end,” recalled Shawn. “And I could hear distinctively my mom and dad screaming for me.”

She was expected to win gold in the individual all-around competition. But going into her final event she was a distant 8th.

“I figured it out about ten seconds before I started my floor routine, that my chances of gold were gone,” she told Rocca. “I told myself, ‘If you can’t actually get the gold medal, I want to go out there and prove to the 50,000 people in the arena that I deserved it.’”

“Was it liberating?” Rocca asked.

“Definitely. I remember that routine, that moment – I had zero pressure. I was just wanting to go out there and have fun and do the best routine of my life.”

She managed to win silver, which Johnson says taught her something invaluable: “My worth isn’t determined by a color of a medal.”

“Getting a silver,” said Rocca, “is not getting a gold.”

“Exactly. You know, one of the first questions I was asked was, ‘How does it feel to lose?’ And I said, ‘You know, if that’s what people think, then we have it all wrong, ’cause I didn’t lose anything. I won a silver medal.’”

After Beijing, Johnson took a two-year break from gymnastics. Slowing down for her meant competing in “Dancing With the Stars.” She took top honors. And there were other accolades.

“Yeah, during the Iowa State Fair in 2008, I was sculpted out of butter!” Johnson laughed. “And in Iowa that is a very big deal, ’cause every year they normally sculpt the cow out of butter.”

But the sport she loved so much kept calling her back. And the mother who loves her daughter so much has mixed feelings about that.

“Secretly, I hoped she was done,” said Teri. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. I really thought that after the Olympics, we would just kind of go back home and things would just go back to normal.”

But Shawn Johnson doesn’t have time for “normal” . . . at least not right now.

When asked to guess what she’ll be doing in 20 years’ time, Johnson replied, “I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow, let alone in 20 years. I have no idea. I have to finish college, you know, have a family, be just living a normal life. But hopefully be successful.”