Shawn Johnson East on why she hasn’t spoken to Nastia Liukin in eight years

Shawn Johnson East looks back on a time when she wasn’t speaking to her former Olympic teammate and best friend Nastia Liukin for eight years.

While on Access to Hollywood‘Behind the donkey,” Johnson East shared the real reason why the two fell out of touch for nearly a decade.

“Nastia and I were best friends, trained and at the Olympics we were roommates,” says Johnson East, 32. “We were 16 and 18 years old, we were kids. I felt like we were so in the spotlight and under scrutiny to be each other’s biggest competitors. And we had discovered on the competition floor how to be best friends and competitors. But when the world started to interfere with how we should deal with it, they said we should also be each other’s worst enemies.”

The rift lasted 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 get back to talking to each other,’ and we did,” she recalled. And since then it’s like we haven’t missed a beat.

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But 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.

“It was great,” says the mother, who welcomed her third baby with husband Andreas East in December 2023, recalls. “It was also very confusing for both of us because we were very nervous. We didn’t know how to rekindle that… and it really was within two minutes that we were best friends again.”

Now Liukin, 35, and Johnson are permanent 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 of their reconciliation. “And it has been that way ever since.”