Among friends

PHILADELPHIA -- Outside Chow’s Gymnastics, a large aluminum building sitting in an industrial park in West Des Moines, Iowa, the Raccoon River was rising as rapidly as Shawn Johnson, America’s best gymnast, when she does her high-flying double twisting vault.

As friends and neighbors, hundreds of them, piled up sandbags outside, Johnson and one of her coaches, Liwen Zhuang, corralled their thoughts to focus on one small thing: flips and turns on the four-inch balance beam.

“I could hear the water outside,” Johnson said, who kept doing the flips and turns. “I just tried not to think about it.”

Finally Zhuang’s husband and Johnson’s primary coach Liang Chow rushed into his gym and told them to get off the beam. Now. “It was getting so bad,” Chow said. “And they didn’t want to leave.”

Johnson, who is 4 foot 9 and about 90 pounds, went to join the sandbaggers until Chow grabbed his star pupil and told her no. “I wanted to help,” Johnson said. “All those people were trying to save our gym.”

Instead Chang and Johnson drove about 30 miles north to the campus of Iowa State in Ames. USA Gymnastics President Steve Penny said the national organization had negotiated with the university to give the two-time national all-around champion space to train last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Her preparations were critical. Beginning Friday at the Wachovia Center here, the 16-year-old Johnson will participate in the U.S. Olympic Trials. As reigning world all-around champion, she is favored to win an Olympic gold medal in Beijing.

Johnson is uncomfortable, however, having this discussion about how she has suffered because her gym flooded with over a foot of water. In her state, she knows, thousands of people are homeless and her story pales next to that. And should, she added.

There should be no sympathy for the fact that her floor exercise mat was drenched or that her father, Doug, in a matter of 24 hours received the proper kind of wood and rebuilt that floor so Johnson could be back on a familiar surface by last Sunday. Her dad, who spent $2,000 of his own money, is a contractor used to building in tight time frames but nothing like this. “I think my dad was hurting,” she said. “He did so much work.” He acknowledged to her his quad muscles were cramping up.

“Her father made such a sacrifice,” Chow said. “So many people made a sacrifice for us but in the big picture what went on with us was just a small thing.”

And by the time Johnson left the gym, she saw fish swimming in the parking lot.

And that is why Chow -- a former national gymnast for his native China -- was grateful he had used his common sense instead of listening to city engineers who had told him the gym would not be in danger.

“We moved most of the equipment upstairs,” Chow said. “So that was the right decision we found out, because otherwise it would have been ruined.”

Chow had decided to make his life in Iowa nearly two decades ago when he left his homeland to fulfill a dream of owning his own gym.

His experiences last weekend made Chow realize that whenever people from back home or from the gymnastics world would ask why he had settled in such a gymnastics backwater as Des Moines he can give them a perfect answer.

“This community in Iowa has made me feel loving in the heart,” Chow said. “We didn’t even have to ask. The people came out. City council members, gymnasts, their parents, friends. It is a warm feeling to have when you don’t feel you are a stranger. You belong.”

For a gymnast at this sensitive training time, a disruption in schedule is bad enough. A disruption in equipment, where every little dead spot in a home floor is memorized and the sound her footsteps make on the vault runway are mentally recorded, it felt traumatic to leave for the university.

“You count on the equipment being just so,” Johnson said. “But I really shouldn’t even be talking about this because other people have had much worse stuff happen.”

The top two all-around competitors after the two days of trials -- Friday and Sunday -- are guaranteed an Olympic spot.

Since Johnson has finished first in four of the five major competitions she has entered since become a senior-level gymnast last year (she finished second in the other) Johnson seems almost a lock to have her Olympic spot on Sunday.

She also will have her hometown gym back to normal.

“People are still working on it,” said Chow, who did not have flood insurance. “There are still holes to patch and things to paint and such but thanks to people of Iowa, the gym will be ready for Shawn.”

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diane.pucin@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

There’ll be no more 10s

There are no more perfect 10s in gymnastics -- the score made famous by Bela Karolyi’s Romanian star Nadia Comaneci. The sport now has a two-part system.

The “A” score is given to indicate the combined difficulty of a routine and is determined by a two-person panel. The difficulty value is determined by the 10 most difficult skills. There is a Code of Points that outlines how difficult a skill is.

The “B” score, or execution score, is determined by a six-person panel. Ten is still perfect and deductions are made from 10 for mistakes in technique, execution and artistry. The highest and lowest scores are discarded.

The score that is flashed to the audience is the combined total from the “A” and “B” panels.

An example:

On her gold-medal floor exercise performance at U.S. nationals, Shawn Johnson received an “A” score of 6.600 and a “B” score of 9.450 for a total of 16.050 on the first night. The second night her “A” score was 6.600 and the “B” score was 9.600 for a total of 16.200. This meant that while the judges saw that she did the same elements the first night, she performed them with fewer mistakes the second night.

-- Diane Pucin