Shawn Johnson finally took home a gold for some killer work on her best apparatus, the balance beam. That girl can land on the four-inch wide piece of wood like nobody’s business.

“To finally get the gold on my final routine in my Olympic career – er, experience, it’s the perfect ending,” Shawn said. “It means more to me than any medal ever could.”

After getting screwed in the individual all-around competition, she went on to also take silver on floor. Though she was amazingly technical, the Romanian who won that competition totally deserved it. She was both technical and artistic- a perfect blend of Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin. But the beam is where Shawn finally got to shine. Two girls fell, several bobbled, but Nastia and Shawn rocked it. Though Liukin’s execution scores were better than hers, Johnson’s start value was a whopping 7.0 which gave her a total score of 16.225 over Liukin’s 16.025. Shawn had her gold.

“Coming in, I really wanted it,” Shawn said. “But I mean, I didn’t care what I got. Any medal or no medal at all, I just wanted to come out here and give the best I could.

“To end with a gold, though, really made me feel – proud.”

Shawn will go home to Iowa at the end of these Games with four medals. One gold (beam), three silvers (team, individual all-around, floor).

Nastia will head home to Texas with five medals. One gold (the individual all-around), three silvers (team, uneven bars, beam), one bronze (floor). She tied the U.S. gymnastics record of five Olympic medals at one Games, set by Mary Lou Retton in 1984 and duplicated by Shannon Miller in Barcelona in 1992. She also now holds bragging rights in her own house – with one more medal than her dad and coach, Valeri, who won four medals in Seoul in 1988 while competing for the Soviet Union.

It’s unbelievably obvious that these Olympic judges preferred Nastia’s artistic style to Shawn’s technical prowess, but Shawn never seemed to let that bother her. She went out there, kicked butt and sucked up the bad scores, grinning through it all. She’s one mature 16 year old high schooler.

Source: NBC

Photo source: Google

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