Gymnast Horton has always been bundle of energy

HARTFORD - Jonathan Horton, it could be said, is a home wrecker. In the purely physical sense.

Like so many elite gymnasts, the 24-year-old Horton, who is defending his U.S. title at this week's national championships here, has left a trail of broken furniture in his wake, the result of typically hyperkinetic tendencies. Intent on flying as soon as he could walk, Horton admits to inadvertently dismantling various structures as a child.

"I've ripped down door frames," he confessed, rather proudly. "I used to climb on everything. I was a destroyer, breaking bed springs, all that."

Of course, he was told the basics, such as not to jump on the bed, "but as soon as my parents turned around . . . " At 3, he was doing backflips, riding the automatic garage door. He recalled climbing a pole in the middle of a Target store up to the ceiling. At 4, his parents, in effect, institutionalized him, putting him a gymnastics program.

Raised in Texas and educated at the University of Oklahoma - he has a business administration degree - Horton hasn't grown beyond 5-1, but he has muscles on his muscles and his metabolism set him up, from the beginning, for such achievements as his bronze medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where he was the only American male to win an individual gymnastics medal (the high bar).

"I'm always trying to push the limits of excitement," he said. "It's not just for me; when I jump on that high bar, I want people to be excited by what they see. I want people to see me and say, 'OK, let's go home now; nobody can't beat him.'

"Like Kohei Uchimura . He can finish the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen and when he's done, he's like, 'Uh, I do that all the time.'"

Halfway through the nationals here, Horton is leading the all-around competition, which serves as qualifying for the October world championships in the Netherlands, in spite of a fall off the high bar, his best apparatus.

"When I let go , I thought, 'I have it,'" he said. "Then I hit the floor and it was, 'Oh, I didn't have it.'"

Naturally, he went right back for more, finished the routine and still held his total points lead. "It's a little scary to get up there and compete something you just fell on," Horton said. "But I've been doing that move for 10 years."

And the good news is, of all the things Horton has busted up over the years, his own body is not among them. "Knock on wood, I've never even had surgery, never even broken a bone. Other than my nose. Falling off the high bar two years ago, being an idiot."

Sure, he has tendinitis in both knees, knots in his Achilles, bursitis in both shoulders, bad wrists. "But that's every gymnast," he said.

They're just being active.