Pole vaulter Armand “Mondo” Duplantis was recently asked if he was actually an addict. A jump over six meters with a fiber rod, doesn’t that eventually make you addicted? Duplantis didn’t think twice, he said as dryly as ever: “It’s more the addiction to find confirmation that things are going on. You never want to stand still in life, no matter what you do, even if it’s just a matter of centimeters .” And in his job it is now the case that if he goes one centimeter higher again, a new world record will be broken.
On Sunday, on the last day of the World Championships in Athletics in Eugene, the time had come again: the 22-year-old crossed 6.21 meters, one centimeter more than he had done indoors in spring (the world association has broken records in pole vaulting in the Outdoors and indoors count equally). Duplantis jumped off the mat and painted a somersault in the air on the track, you’ve never seen him so ecstatic. This time he didn’t think so much about the record, Duplantis later said, he just wanted to win this world title. He wasn’t actually world champion until Sunday.
It was, both figuratively and literally, the final flourish of this World Cup and a firework display that is becoming increasingly difficult to pin down by previous standards. Nigeria’s Tobi Amusan had run the 100m hurdles a few hours earlier in 12.12 seconds, a world record in the semifinals, and her 12.06 seconds in the final escaped the record books only because the tailwind was too strong. Welcome to the new world of athletics, where times that used to be hammered into video game consoles are becoming reality.
Tobi Amusan already set a world record in the semi-finals over the 100 meter hurdles – her best time in the final was not recognized due to a tailwind.
(Photo: IMAGO/CHAI/IMAGO/Chai vd Laage)
Duplantis’ flights in increasingly thin air still seem plausible because the Swede is in a competition that he won a long time ago. As a child, he emulated his brothers, and his father, who used to be a pole vaulter himself, built a facility in the garden. Somehow, the parents, who were enthusiastic about sports, managed to get their son to romp through the sport without letting him burn out with early drills. Duplantis almost incidentally acquired the movements of an art that many only grasped later, and that even world champions and Olympic champions keep slipping away from, this discipline is so complex: the run-up with the stick, the puncture, the gymnastics up at a height of five or six meters.
For four or five years now, Duplantis has been jumping poles of a hardness that he can only bend because he puts so much speed into the pole when running up and sticking through like no other. He has internalized these movements, it is a credit that he can basically only gamble away himself, should he get injured or lose interest.
Not that it looks like it anytime soon. “I think I’ve already done some great things,” he said at a press round a couple of weeks ago, “but I always feel like there’s more to be done.” And that’s not something that can be taken for granted either: He’s learned that sometimes you need to distance yourself from what you do best. Especially, he joked, if that means losing sight of his dad, who still coaches him to this day.
Duplantis improves the record centimeter by centimeter – most recently in January in the hall.
(Photo: Christian Petersen/AFP)
When a reporter recently asked him how Duplantis felt that more and more top athletes were reporting on their mental struggles with themselves, such as 200-meter world champion Noah Lyles – the 22-year-old gave a rare insight into his inner life. Before his Olympic victory a year ago, he had “almost gone mad,” he said, because: “If I hadn’t won that, a lot of people would have been very disappointed. That there can be so much burden in one day, that the smallest little thing destroys everything – I’ve never experienced that before.” In any case, he can now “fully understand” when athletes collapse under this pressure.
“Since then,” Duplantis said, “everything I do feels like a bonus.”
The problems are different now. 6.22 meters next, for sure. Before the World Cup, he had also had an operation on his eyes; he was tired of contact lenses, he said. He once overheard the story of US jumper Jeff Hartwig, who messed up the US championships because his contact lenses were unusable in dry air. “I’ve been a bit paranoid since then,” Duplantis said, but that problem is solved now.
Blessed are those who have such worries. And now an even better perspective.