Shawn Johnson Needed to Go Pro in Gymnastics as a Teen to ‘Pay Bills’

Olympian Shawn Johnson East faced a tough choice at a young age — go pro in gymnastics or compete at the collegiate level.

“I remember there was a huge discrepancy because I desperately wanted to compete in collegiate athletics,” Johnson East, 33, said on the Sunday, July 27, episode of the “Sunday Sports Club” podcast. “But, because of money and paying off student debt and all these things, I ended up having to go professional, so I could pay bills.”

She added, “The fact that I even had to make that decision between going to college and getting a college education on top of competing and just going to work, it shouldn’t have been an issue.”

Johnson East competed in the 2008 Olympic Games when she was just 16 years old, earning a gold medal in the balance beam event and three other silver honors in other distinctions. She retired in 2012 ahead of the next Olympics following an injury.

The gold medalist initially started training as a young child.

“One of the reasons I fell in love with gymnastics is [that] I found such a community of best friends and almost sisters in my teammates,” Johnson East recalled to podcast host Allison Kuch. “I loved going to the gym, and I loved hanging out with them.”

Johnson East also really enjoyed jumping on the trampoline, which quickly led to a more regular training routine.

“I did that for years. I did one or two classes a week,” she recalled. “As it progressed, I then went on to do soccer on top of that. I tried track in middle school, [and] I danced. I did all these different things, so that was very, very normal in the context of, like, I wasn’t disciplined. I would skip practices.”

By the time Johnson East turned 12, her coach said that her practices were starting to get “more intense.”

“[He said,] ‘The next step would be to try to go for this national team and start competing.’ That was when I had to weed things out and became a not-so-ordinary child,” she said. “I ended up giving up track and soccer and dance, and got to be very disciplined.”

Johnson East continued, “I was just obsessed with it. I’m a very perfectionist-driven personality, which I see in my daughter [Drew] now, which is terrifying. I don’t know how to parent that … but I was so obsessed with it, and I was so driven by going back and learning more and doing better.”

Johnson East shares Drew and sons Jett and Bear with her husband, Andrew East.