Shawn Johnson East is looking back at a time when she didn’t speak to her former Olympic teammate and best friend Nastia Liukin for eight years.
While on Access Hollywood’s “Behind the Easel,” Johnson East shared the real reason why the two lost touch for nearly a decade.
“Nastia and I were best friends, training, and at the Olympics we were roommates,” Johnson East, 32, said. “We were 16 and 18 years old, we were kids. I felt like we were under the spotlight and scrutiny so much to be each other’s top, biggest competitors. And we had figured out on the competition floor how to be best friends and competitors. But when the world started kind of interjecting how we should handle it, they said we should also be each other’s worst enemies as well.”
The rift lasted for eight years, Johnson East says — until their significant others intervened.
“Our boyfriends at the time got so tired of hearing us talk about each other that they said. ‘Enough of this, just go talk to each other again,’ and we did,” she recalled. “And ever since then, it’s just like we haven’t skipped a beat.”
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Yet for the four-time Olympic medalist and Liukin — who won gold in the all-around at the 2008 Beijing Games — butterflies were on the menu at their reunion lunch.
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“It was amazing,” the mother, who welcomed her third baby with husband Andrew East in December 2023, recalls. “It also was really confusing for both of us because we were really nervous. We didn’t know how to rekindle that … and it was truly within like two minutes we were back to being best friends.”
Now, Liukin, 35, and Johnson are fixtures in each other’s orbit.
“We both said the same thing, ‘I don’t know what happened but I miss you and I miss us,’ ” Johnson recalled about their reconciliation. “And it’s been that way ever since.”
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