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

while it is in Access Hollywood‘Behind the easel” Johnson East shared the real reason why the two lost touch for almost a decade.

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

The breakup lasted eight years, Johnson East says, until loved ones intervened.

“Our boyfriends at the time got so tired of hearing us talk about each other that they said. ‘Enough of this, let’s just talk again,’ and we did,” he 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 event at the 2008 Beijing Games, butterflies were on the menu for their reunion lunch.

“It was incredible,” the mother said. who welcomed her third baby with husband andres this in December 2023, remember. “It was also very confusing for both of us because we were so nervous. “We didn’t know how to rekindle that… and it was really in about two minutes that we became best friends again.”

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 of their reconciliation. “And it’s been that way ever since.”