Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson East is recalling her 8-year feud with former teammate and close friend Nastia Liukin.
During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the pair competed together as part of Team USA. The gymnasts were good friends before the Summer Games, but Johnson East said in a recent interview that their bond quickly changed when faced with pressure of being in the spotlight.
“Nastia and I, we were best friends, training, and at the Olympics, we were roommates,” she told Access Hollywood in a Nov. 4 interview. “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.”
Johnson East said the international stage did ultimately end up impacting their friendship.
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning. >Sign up for NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
"But when the world kind of started interjecting how we should handle it, they said we should also be each other's worst enemies as well," she explained. "So we didn't speak for eight years."
The two kept their distance during that time, but Johnson East said their then-boyfriends eventually got "so tired" of hearing them talk about one another that they pushed their girlfriends to open lines of communication.
"And we did," Johnson East said. "And ever since then, it's just been like we haven't skipped a beat. We're each other's biggest fans, best friends, biggest supporters and we just love each other."
Sports Connection
Connecting you to your favorite North Texas sports teams as well as sports news around the globe.
As for how they rekindled their friendship, Johnson East explained that she and Liukin had lunch together in New York. Once they started talking, they forgot all about the past.
“It was truly, within like, two minutes, we were back to being best friends,” she said. “We both said the same thing, like, ‘I don’t know what happened, but I miss you, and I miss us.’ And then it’s been that way ever since.”
Johnson East, who won four medals at the 2008 Olympics, got injured while trying to make the team for the 2012 London Games. Soon after, she retired from the sport, and has since become a New York Times bestselling author, wife to former football player Andrew East and loving mom to three children.
Liukin, who won five medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, has gone on to mentor aspiring gymnasts, per her website. Liukin also shares moments of her life over on Instagram, from style inspiration to travel photos and more.
This article first appeared on TODAY.com. Read more from TODAY here:
