BALANCING HER ACT

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa -- Shawn Johnson got a red Range Rover from her agent, which comes in handy when a blizzard sweeps through her hometown as it did on a January day when Johnson and her parents, Doug and Teri, and her coach, Liang Chow, welcomed visitors to the home of America’s next gymnastics star. The color Johnson is working for now isn’t red, though.

It’s gold.

Johnson, 16, will begin her 2008 competitive season today at the Tyson’s American Cup at Madison Square Garden. The meet will also provide a chance for Johnson’s teammate, Nastia Liukin, to prove she is recovered from an ankle injury that hobbled her last year, and it will be the international competitive debut of 2004 Olympic all-around gold medalist Paul Hamm, who had been in retirement for three years after the Athens Games.

But Johnson will be the main attraction. The 4-foot-9, 90-pound high school sophomore dazzled competitors, coaches and fans last year by winning every event she entered, including the world and U.S. championships and the American Cup.

Her decisive tumbling, dancing and twirling at the world championships in Stuttgart included three gold medals -- team, individual all-around and floor exercise. Her megawatt performance marked Johnson as the favorite not only to become Olympic champion in Beijing in August but also to be a breakout sports star.

“Now I’m the one to beat. I realize that. I accept that,” Johnson said. “I’m still out there trying to beat myself, you know? I’m still working to get this self better than my self from last year.”

Johnson is balancing two different worlds. In one, she puts on her parka and heads off to West Valley High to dissect a cow’s eyeball in biology, write a short story for an American literature class and understand the tricks of French grammar.

She likes shopping for jeans and hanging out at the mall. She watches “Friends” and “Will and Grace” reruns and “Celebrity Apprentice.”

“I can’t believe Nadia Comaneci got knocked out,” Johnson said.

Her other life is at the gym or filming TV commercials or making appearances with other potential Olympic stars. She’s met LeBron James and has become good friends with U.S. track star Sonya Richards.

Her sponsors include Coca-Cola, Adidas and Hy-Vee, a Midwestern grocery store where Johnson finds it cool that life-size posters of her will greet shoppers.

Cody Goldberg, Adidas’ Olympic sports marketing manager, pointed at the grinning Johnson and said, “That smile is a brand in itself.” Johnson later looked puzzled when asked what brand she thought she represented. “I don’t even know what that means,” she said.

Branding their daughter was never the plan of Johnson’s parents. Teri, who works for the local school system, and Doug, a self-employed subcontractor, met at a roller rink when they were in junior high. “We’re not big-deal people,” Doug said.

Their hopes for Shawn were simple: that she have good friends, do well in school, maybe go to college and, Teri said, “Just be a happy kid.”

Shawn was happy but also rambunctious and energetic, and it was at Chow’s gym where she seemed most content.

It was fun, Teri said, to see Shawn doing cartwheels all over the place. It made Teri and Doug proud when Shawn began winning local, then state and then national competitions. “Each step just followed naturally,” Teri said. “No one ever sat down and told us, ‘Shawn can go to the Olympics. To go to the Olympics do this.’ ”

They also noticed how too often the sudden slam of celebrity also came along with an attitude of entitlement. “We’d see some parents being very aggressive,” Doug said, “or the athlete acting badly and Teri and I would look at each other and say, ‘That’s awful.’

“I thought, ‘I hope we will never be like that,’ ” Teri said. “If I’ve done anything consciously through these years, it’s to make sure that nobody gets the impression from me or Shawn that we are better than anyone because it is distasteful. You might be good at what you’re doing but somebody else is better at something else.”

A couple of months ago Teri said she noticed Shawn was eating less. “We had that conversation here recently,” Teri said. “I don’t want her going overboard. I want her to stay being what she’s been successful being. Her thing was, ‘I want to know I did everything I could do, whatever happens.’ She said she didn’t want to look back on this year and think that if she’d only lost five pounds she would have won a gold medal.”

The Johnsons have relied on Chow to keep the demands outside the gym to a minimum. Chow, a talented gymnast for China in the 1980s, refused a recent sponsor request to make a promotional appearance with Johnson in Beijing.

“Too much travel,” Chow said. “Our main goal is to achieve her Olympic dreams. We have to control the daily schedule or else Beijing in August becomes a gamble.”

In the last 21 years only one woman, Ukraine’s Lilia Podkopayeva in Atlanta in 1996, won Olympic all-around gold a year after winning the world championships.

“Last year went by so fast it feels like yesterday,” Johnson says. “The motivation now is to beat what I did last year and set the bar higher.”

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diane.pucin@latimes.com