Midway through our Zoom interview, Shawn Johnson East’s child, Jett, enters the frame. “Babies everywhere!” she jokes. The retired gymnast is sitting at the kitchen table in her Nashville home, where she and her husband Andrew East, a retired NFL player, are raising Jett and their two other young children, Drew and Barrett. “I’ve learned to embrace the chaos,” she says, a faint hint of exhaustion in her eyes.
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Johnson East won the gold medal on the balance beam and three silver medals in the team, all-around, and floor exercise. America fell in love with her easy charm and inspiring backstory as a girl from the heartland who made it to the top. But as she catapulted headfirst into household name territory, she felt like fans only got a glimpse of who she really was.
Today, the sparkly leotards and Amanars are gone. Johnson East’s new world is less gymnastics and more kid corralling, and she captures it all on camera for her family YouTube channel Shawn & Andrew. “I got tired of the world painting my life as being so perfect, [like] a fluff piece,” she says. Her videos are a big departure from the picture-perfect athlete the world thought they knew, often featuring brutally honest conversations with her husband about marriage and parenthood. “I have such a different perspective now,” she says. “Life is actually hard and vulnerable and real, not polished and edited—and that’s just more relatable.” Their family is not exactly like the Bakers in Cheaper by the Dozen, but their household is filled with a similar kind of loving disarray—and 1.67 million loyal subscribers tune in to watch it all unfold.
When Johnson East was 3 years old, her parents, Doug and Teri Johnson, enrolled her in a gymnastics class in West Des Moines, Iowa, where they lived. Three years later, she began training under legendary coach Liang Chow, who had opened a studio in the area after leaving his post at the University of Iowa’s gymnastics program. Chow was unlike other instructors, abandoning standard all-consuming training regimens in favor of a more balanced routine. Johnson East was still able to attend public high school and do all of the things a normal student might do, like go to prom, for instance. “We had Dairy Queen after practice,” she says. “We just kind of proved the [old] system wrong.”
By the time she became a member of the national senior team in 2007, Johnson East was a front-runner to win gold in the individual all-around event at the 2008 Olympics. But the pressure of it all made her feel a little lost. “I defined who I was by gymnastics,” she says. “I put so much pressure on myself as a kid. Now, as a mom, I look back and I’m like, Oh honey, you should have had more fun.”
Until then, Johnson East’s teammate Nastia Liukin, who was also gunning for a gold in the all-around, had been “like a sister,” she says. But as the two traded wins, media headlines pitted the two against each other, and the friendship fell apart. “We were kids who didn’t know how to digest the competitiveness that the world was placing on us,” Johnson says. “We isolated ourselves from each other, even though we really needed each other more than anything.”
The weight of the global spotlight, and the loss of a friendship that had kept her grounded, took a toll. “Until that moment I had been doing gymnastics for me,” Johnson East says. “I felt a little bit confused, like I was [competing] for the viewers or the people watching, and not for myself.”
In Beijing, Liukin placed first in the individual all-around and Johnson East came in at a close second. The two went head-to-head again in the balance beam final, but this time Johnson East secured the victory. After the Olympics, she landed brand deals with the likes of McDonald’s, Nike, and Cheerios. She also went on to judge a Miss America pageant, compete twice on Dancing with the Stars (winning once), and make a cameo on The Secret Life of the American Teenager. When it came time to start training for the 2012 London Games, Johnson East says she felt “really run down, both physically and mentally,” and was “actually scared of being selected.”
She began to wonder if this moment belonged to a different gymnast. “I don’t think I was the best there, and if my seniority placed me [on the team], I would’ve been taking that from someone else, which they deserved a lot more than I did,” she says. “It just didn’t seem fair, so it was my time to be like, ‘I’m good.’”
One week before trials, she pulled out of the competition, citing stress and a left knee injury. “It was just this overwhelming feeling of being done,” she confesses. “I wanted out of this system that just pushed and pushed and pushed overtraining and undereating. I protected myself by leaving the sport.”
Back then, it was more common for gymnasts to retire after one Olympics. Athletes like Aly Raisman and Simone Biles have since changed that, proving it’s not impossible to come back and compete again. “They really stood up to the organization and opened up a whole new opportunity for gymnasts to continue in the sport for many generations,” Johnson East says. “We’re seeing talent we’ve never seen before because of them.”
Retiring as an elite athlete can be hard. “I only knew how to do handstands,” Johnson East says. “I was paralyzed by this fear of not being good at something or not living up to the Olympic standard that people expected from me. I felt like I couldn’t even try new hobbies, because if I wasn’t automatically good at them, people would be like, ‘Well, you’re an Olympic gold medalist, you should be.’”
Instead of taking center stage in London, she played a more behind-the-scenes role as a social media correspondent for The Today Show. During a cycling competition, Johnson East met Team USA cyclist Guy East, who quickly pivoted their conversation to set her up with his younger brother, Andrew. “I was like, ‘This is weird,’” Johnson East remembers thinking to herself. But after returning home, she decided to go on the blind date anyway, and was pleasantly surprised by the “funniest, cutest, quirkiest, nerdiest guy” she’d ever met. On subsequent get-togethers, which ranged from mini golf to pottery classes, Andrew helped her discover who she was outside of gymnastics. “He let me be a normal person with no expectations,” she says.
For the first time in a long time, Johnson East felt like she could separate who she was from the athlete the rest of the world thought they knew. Her new partner also encouraged ending her feud with Liukin once and for all. “Our boyfriends got sick and tired of hearing us talk about one another,” she says. “They were like, ‘You all need to fix this.’” Following a lunch date in New York City, the two remain close friends to this day.
As an only child, Johnson East was initially overwhelmed by Andrew’s big family (he’s one of five kids), but after moving to Tennessee and getting married in 2016, she began to dream of starting her own one day. Three years later, they welcomed their first child, a baby girl named Drew. Their son Jett followed in 2021, and another boy, Barrett, was born in 2023.
On YouTube, she gives viewers a real look at family life—and all the juggling she does at any given time. Her kids are often featured, but Johnson East remains steadfast that the focus of her content remain on the adults. “Our life that we share on social media is not about our kids, it’s about being parents,” she says. “If Drew doesn’t want to be on camera, she’s not on camera.”
She won’t shy away from talking about the hard things, like her miscarriage in 2017 or overcoming marital issues. “We started sharing more vulnerable content, and it connected with people,” she says. While Johnson East already had built-in fans, Andrew, who retired from the NFL in 2022 to become a full-time content creator, has helped expand their audience as they continue to embrace honesty and openness.
They also have a new podcast called Couple Things, where real-life couples sit down with them to talk about the ups and downs of marriage. “I got sick and tired of hearing people say that if you have an argument, you should get a divorce,” Johnson East says.
Just like the sports world, the internet can be an unforgiving place. “Social media can feel very mindless or vain or materialistic or greedy,” Johnson East says. “I’m consumed with what is good for our family, what is good for our community, our followers, my kids, and my husband. People forget that sometimes—they always want to see the worst in others. And my husband and I really want to spread the message that it should be the opposite. Kindness kills.”
She credits Simone Biles, who has become an advocate for mental health and safety in sports, with helping gymnasts stay grounded. “She started a movement that allowed little girls to feel like they had voices again,” she says. “She truly will change the lives of every kid who is in the sport from now on, because of what she did.”
Although gymnastics is in the rearview mirror, Johnson East still follows along as a fan. When I ask whether her kids understand her impact on the sport, she shrugs. “I did a backflip on our trampoline the other day and my daughter almost pooped her pants,” she says. “She couldn’t understand how mommy knew how to do that.”
It’s important that her kids don’t feel pressure to achieve success, even if the Olympics are a hot topic in their house as the Paris Games approach. “I don’t want our kids to ever feel like they’re expected to do anything of that same level,” she says. “I was so in love with gymnastics…I was obsessed with it and my husband had that same passion for football. I will have succeeded as a parent if I can help my kids find whatever that is for them, whether it’s piano or mathematics or acting or gymnastics.”
Even though Johnson East once claimed she would never push her profession on her children, it seems Drew might be following in mom’s footsteps after all. “My daughter is in a little gymnastics class that she loves,” she says. “It’s like sharing a piece of who I am with my family.”
Associate Editor
Samuel is the Associate Editor at ELLE Magazine. Prior to this role, he was the Assistant to ELLE’s Editor-in-Chief, Nina Garcia. At ELLE, Samuel writes about music, fashion, arts, and culture, interviewing Normani, Lola Tung, Sara Bareilles, Kelli O’Hara, Nicholas Galitzine, Tate McRae, and more. Raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Samuel attended Northwestern University and currently resides in New York City.
