Simone Biles Says She's Taking Things 'One Step at a Time' Ahead of the 2020 Olympics
Simone Biles is focusing on the present ahead of the next Olympics.
The gymnastics superstar, who recently won her fifth world all-around title and became the most decorated gymnast at the gymnastics world championships, tells PEOPLE that she’s taking things “one step at a time” before she competes in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo next summer.
“Right now, my mindset is to kind of take everything one day at a time, one step at a time because you never know what will happen and you can’t take any training for granted,” Biles, 22, tells PEOPLE. “Kind of live in the moment.”
“Day in and day out, we’re just training so that I can be the best of my ability, mentally and physically and emotionally, and we’ll see how it goes next year,” she continues, adding that she doesn’t find it hard to get in the zone during training.
“Once you’re in the gym … we’re there for one reason, and that’s to get our work done and to try to hit those goals that we want to achieve,” Biles explains. “It’s instilled in us to tune everything out and be there for that one practice, and then once we get out of there then we let the outside world in … We’re training for one reason.”
Amid her busy training schedule, the athlete is also partnering with LEGO for a short film that explores the importance of creativity and play — and is sharing how she uses creativity in her own gymnastics routines.
“You have to start from a base and we build up our routine, break it down if we don’t like the order that it’s in, we just rebuild it and make it our own,” Biles says. “So I feel like that’s the creative aspect that we do with our routines.”
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Biles also recently made headlines for completing a historic triple-double move earlier this summer. The difficult tumbling pass requires the gymnast to first perform two flips before seamlessly entering into three twists in a tucked position.
She then completed the move at the world championships in Stuttgart, Germany, earlier this month, ensuring that the triple-double will now be named the Biles II, in honor of the athlete.
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Biles tells PEOPLE that she’s been playing with the move since she was “a little bit younger,” but started working on it more seriously this year.
“Thinking of the possibility of actually completing it kind of blew my mind,” she says, “but we started training it in the gym, seeing how it went, and it went pretty well so we were like, ‘Wow, this could actually be brought to life in a routine.’ “
“It took quite a while because you have to be mentally on point every time you do that,” she continues, “because it is a little bit dangerous, but I was so excited to actually nail it and get the opportunity to compete it.”
