Derek Hough says one of the hardest losses of his Dancing With the Stars run came with Shawn Johnson. In a recent interview, he said that All-Star season was one of two he still believes he could have won, even though he and Johnson finished in second place.
That memory still stands out because Hough was not talking about a routine near miss. He said he and Johnson were doing back flips and other tricks that had never been done on the show before, and he remembered one moment in which she was standing on his shoulders when they tipped over. Johnson had already won Dancing With the Stars in Season 8 with Mark Ballas, so the pairing carried the weight of a former champion trying to repeat.
Hough also said it was one of his favorite seasons and that, week after week, the performances were “pretty damn good.” Even so, he and Johnson finished behind Melissa Rycroft and Tony Dovolani in 2012. For Hough, that is what keeps the season in the conversation whenever he talks about the best and worst of his time on the ballroom floor: the dancing felt strong enough to win, but the result never moved in his favor.
The season also fits into a larger pattern in Hough’s career. He later recalled his Season 18 partnership with Amy Purdy, saying that run was especially meaningful because Purdy was the first double amputee and Paralympian on the show, even though they finished behind Meryl Davis and Maksim Chmerkovskiy. Hough, a six-time Mirrorball champion, kept adding to his record after that, with Season 23 as his last season as a pro before he returned as a judge in Season 29 in 2020.
The timing of the comments matters because Hough is speaking now while also working with Huggies on the #huggiesfirst campaign. He said his daughter’s first laugh changed his life before and after that moment, and he added that her crawling and walking were important firsts too. That makes the old DWTS loss feel less like a complaint than a marker of how Hough now measures major moments: the show’s big missed chance on one side, and the firsts in his daughter’s life on the other.
What Hough is really saying is that the Shawn Johnson season was not just memorable because it ended in second place. It was memorable because he thought the pair had done enough to win, and because the gap between what they built on the floor and what the scoreboard gave them still bothers him.
