Shawn Johnson

STUTTGART, Germany -- Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson will be teammates for United States women's gymnastics Wednesday, hoping to lead it to a team gold medal. They will be rivals the rest of the week, aiming to win the all-around title and individual event medals and set themselves up as favorites to be the best gymnast at next summer's Olympics in Beijing. After a dominating performance in qualifying Sunday, the U.S.

Since she won four medals at the 2008 Olympics, including a gold in the balance beam, Shawn Johnson has retired from her sport, written a book, won the mirror ball trophy on "Dancing With the Stars," torn up her knee while skiing and had reconstructive surgery. Oh, yeah, and she's doing gymnastics again. Johnson, 20, who came to the Beijing Games as defending world all-around champion and Olympic favorite, accepted her silver all-around medal, one rung below American teammate Nastia Liukin, with both a smile and tears.

Emmitt Smith was the first athlete to win "Dancing With the Stars. " That was in Season 3, after Jerry Rice finished second in Season 2 to Drew Lachey, the less famous but maybe more talented younger brother of singer Nick Lachey (who used to hang out with USC quarterback Matt Leinart, but that's a whole other reality show). Since then, four other athletes have won the mirror-ball trophy given to the winning couple and, counting Pittsburgh Steelers great Hines Ward on Monday night, 12 have made it to the final three.

It is Nastia Liukin's show this year. After sharing headlines and expectations with U.S. teammate Shawn Johnson before and during the Beijing Olympics in 2008, it is Olympic all-around gold medalist Liukin who is hogging the gymnastics spotlight this season. While Johnson, who won the silver all-around medal, has been off winning "Dancing With the Stars," Liukin has gone back to the gym. She will compete this week at the U.S. gymnastics national championships in Dallas on uneven bars and balance beam with the goal of earning a spot at the world championships in London in October.

Kyla Ross likes homework. The Aliso Niguel high school freshman is particularly fond of science and the intricacies of biology. Ross likes the balance beam too, a piece of gymnastics equipment that she has also studied well. It is, at least on some days, Ross's favorite apparatus. That's on the days when she isn't totally engrossed in her floor exercise, danced and tumbled to music from Phantom of the Opera, or the uneven bars where every release move she does well earns a fist pump from her husband-wife coaches Howie Liang and Jenny Zhang at Costa Mesa's Gym-Max Gymnastics.

Former U.S. Olympian Dominique Moceanu, who at 14 was part of the 1996 gold-medal team, said Tuesday night that USA Gymnastics team coordinator Martha Karolyi once grabbed her by the neck and slammed her face into a phone, and that former coach Bela Karolyi twice berated her about her weight in front of national teammates.

A 3-year-old boy who was found unconscious last week in a burning house that was apparently set afire by a Christmas tree died Monday at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, a hospital official said. Lance Johnson died a few minutes before noon in the hospital's pediatric intensive care unit, where he was being treated for smoke inhalation, a nursing supervisor said. An official cause of death had not been determined, according to a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County coroner's office.

Brad Burnett, Trevor McMunn and Brett McCleave scored goals to break a third-quarter tie and give fourth-ranked El Toro a 10-3 victory over host San Diego Coronado in boys' nonleague water polo Saturday. McCleave had a game-high four goals. Jon Hopkins scored three goals for Coronado. The Charger defense held Jesse Smith, a member of the junior national team, scoreless. Ali Khalessi made four of his 13 saves in the final quarter for El Toro (19-3). In other nonleague games: No.