Flip by flip, skill by skill, four-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles continues to set standards for herself and for her sport.

Biles’ next step into the great beyond will come Saturday at the USA Gymnastics U.S. Classic meet in Louisville, Ky., her first event since winning the all-around at an International Gymnastics Federation World Cup in March in Stuttgart, Germany.

Saturday’s meet is the final qualifying event for the USA Gymnastics national championships in Kansas City next month. Biles, 22, and teammate Jordan Chiles have qualified, but they will be joined in Louisville by seven training partners at varying stages of development at the Biles family’s World Champions Centre in Montgomery County.

Biles, though, will be the center of attention for everyone in attendance, and she plans to unleash the first of several event upgrades she hopes to perform leading up to this year’s nationals and world competitions on the road toward the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

Specifically, Biles will perform an upgraded version of her second tumbling pass on floor exercise, which normally ends with a double flip and a half-twist that culminates in a forward-facing blind landing.

But this time she will add a front layout flip at the end of the maneuver.

Biles, the five-time national all-around champion and 14-time world championship gold medalist, in late May posted a training film of the maneuver on Twitter that drew more than 411,000 views and gasps of amazement from the gymnastics cognoscenti.

“It’s about adding the upgrades at the right time when you’re physically ready,” Biles said after a training session Wednesday. “You don’t want to do anything too dangerous, but it’s also about pacing yourself. You don’t want to put everything in too early.”

Still on hold, for the moment, are two other potential upgrades — a triple-twisting, double-tuck somersault that could be the final element on another floor pass, and a double-twisting somersault dismount on balance beam. Biles performs that dismount on uneven bars, but it has never been accomplished on bars.

Biles said she will do Saturday the same two vaults she performed last year at the world championships, including the double-twisting blind landing vault that bears her name, and will do her 2018 routines on bars and beam, restoring the double-double dismount on bars she did not perform at the World Cup in Stuttgart.

Cecile Canqueteau-Landi, who along with her husband, Laurent Landi, has been coaching Biles since her return to competition last year, said Biles has the imagination and trust in her coaches to continue adding upgraded skills to what are the most complicated routines on floor, vault and beam in the world.

“She starts believing, and then she does it,” Canqueteau-Landi said. “It’s good to have an athlete who pretty much has no limits. She is willing to try things. She’ll say, ‘All right, I’ll try it,’ and when she does it, it’s. ‘OK, I can do it.’ ”

Canqueteau-Landi said the Biles camp will install new floor music for the 2020 Olympic year but that work is well underway on whatever additional tricks she plans to add for her other routines next year.

Biles acknowledged that as the excitement of returning to competition last year has given way to a full year’s preparation toward the Olympic year, she has had to adapt her training style and her mindset to make it through long days of training.

“I feel I’ve grown a lot as a person, but during your first Olympic cycle, you don’t know what to expect,” she said. “You go 100 percent all the time. I have a better idea now of how to pace myself. It’s harder to make it through practices because I’m older and my body kind of hurts.

“I felt in 2016 that I was maxed out for my personal bests, and I keep achieving more than I did in 2016. That kind of blows my mind.”

Other than the normal aches and pains of training, Biles said she is in acceptable physical condition for the Saturday event. As for thinking about competition after 2020, meanwhile, she vacillated more than usual Wednesday from her usual stance that she will retire after Tokyo.

“I’m just trying to get through 2020 first, and then we will see where it goes,” she said.

Biles did note she recently signed a 10-year sponsorship agreement with the equipment manufacturer Spieth America but noted she could continue to work with the company even if she is not an active competitor.

As for this weekend, Biles will be joined in Louisville by senior teammates Chiles, a two-time nationals medalist, Olivia Hollingsworth of Seabrook, Abigael Vides of Spring and Karis German of Spring.

Also competing from World Champions Centre are juniors Zoe Miller of Spring and Maddie Losee of Bradenton, Fla., and age group competitors Rebekah Smith of Houston and Shanell Valles of Spring.

Other local competitors will include Sophia Butler of Houston, Victoria Nguyen of Sugar Land and Eva Volpe of Pearland.

The nine competitors from the Biles’ World Champions Centre probably represent the biggest contingent from a single Houston-area gym at a national event since Bela and Martha Karolyis’ days as personal coaches in the mid-1990s.

“I’ve never had this many teammates before,” Biles said. “Now we have a whole entire crew.”

david.barron@chron.com

twitter.com/dfbarron