Street Name Honors Coach of Shawn Johnson, Gabby Douglas

Park Drive east of Grand Avenue is now Chow’s Olympic Avenue to honor the West Des Moines gymnastics coach who helped Shawn Johnson and Gabby Douglas win Olympic gold medals.

The West Des Moines City Council voted June 24 to rename 500 feet of the street in front of Chow's Gymnastics and Dance Institute.

“I think it is a great honor to have a street named after you,” said gym owner and coach Liang Chow. “It is great to have the city, the mayor and the city officials' support. We are very excited and motivated and have many more generations to come.”

Council members and Mayor Steve Gaer were pleased to have the world-renowned coach present at Monday's meeting.

“We very much appreciate he and his family living in West Des Moines and having their business in West Des Moines and bringing worldwide attention to our community,” Gaer said. 

His back-to-back champions – Johnson in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and Douglas in the 2012 London Olympics – captured the hearts of fans worldwide. Douglas moved from Virginia to West Des Moines to train with Chow after watching Johnson’s Olympic performance, and now Chow is getting calls from aspiring Olympic gymnasts as far away as Brazil and Egypt.

Related: Olympic Gold-Medal Gymnastics: The Midas Touch in West Des Moines

Chow, who grew up in Beijing, was a medal-winning member of China’s national gymnastics team for more than a decade. He moved to Iowa in 1991 to work on his Ph.D at the University of Iowa, where he became part of the men’s and women’s gymnastics coaching staff.

He and his wife, Liwen Zhuang, moved to West Des Moines and opened on Aug. 23, 1998, catering to young students, whose bodies are more flexible than the older gymnasts he’d coached in Iowa City and who are open to new techniques.

This story contains reporting from Editor Beth Dalbey.