UWe are sitting in a luxury Parisian hotel, Mondo Duplantis and I, but his mind is elsewhere. It’s on the track. Then high in the sky. Bending, twisting and twisting over yet another impossible peak, six meters up and the rest. In the exact place where he knows he has broke the world record again.
So what are these milliseconds? “Everyone brings a different type of emotion,” he replies. “But in a way it’s the same. It’s a kind of hysteria.”
Duplantis pauses. And then it’s back to where exaltation meets ecstasy and then gravity. “You go crazy inside because it doesn’t feel real,” he says. “When I go down, I can see that the tape will stay there. But it feels almost fake.
“You go into this feeling almost like cloud nine, a dopamine hit or whatever, and suddenly you’re on another planet. I feel completely out of this world.”
Anyone who has watched the Duplantis vault this year has had a similar ethereal experience. His record? Fifteen races, 15 wins. Gold medals from world indoor championships, European championships and Olympic games. And, amazingly, three more world records.
Every athlete pursues perfection. But in 2024 the Swede achieved it.
The second world record was certainly his Mona Lisa. It came on his final jump on a hot evening at the Paris Games. By then the song was done for the night, leaving only Duplantis, the 6.25m bar, and 77,000 giddy fans at the Stade de France creating a wall of sound to rival anything from Phil Spector.
Duplantis had visualized the moment 1000 times, since the moment he started pole vaulting in the backyard as a young child (it helps when your father is a retired elite jumper and your mother is a former heptathlete). And in a burst of glorious Technicolor: it all came true.
We live in a world where athletics has been relegated to the fringes, but on that wild night, the daredevil door slammed into the mainstream.
After Paris, Duplantis gained a million followers on Instagram. And he soon made more headlines by beating the 400m hurdles record holder, Carsten Warholm, in a much-publicized 100m exhibition race. His time of 10.37 seconds on a cold night wasn’t too bad either. For good measure, he was recently named European Athlete of the Year and, at a glitzy ceremony in Monaco on Sunday, World Athletics Athlete of the Year. No matter the field, he will be my athlete of the year, period.
The intriguing question is what happens next. Duplantis has it all: talent, a Gen Z personality (his father describes him as “a bit reckless” and remembers jumping off rooftops on his skateboard), and even a fiancé who’s a successful model and influencer.
But everything is different in an Olympic year. For example, when Michael Johnson launches his $12m (£9.4m) track Grand Slam, it will not feature on-site events. “I think I can keep track,” Johnson says. “I don’t think I can save athletics.”
Yet something else Duplantis told me about pole vaulting serves as a clear answer. “I think it’s the most technical, the most beautiful and the most exotic event,” he said. “There’s a very beautiful complexity to it.”
I couldn’t agree more. The fact that he is able to jump over 6.26m, almost the height of one and a half London double-decker buses squished on top of each other, with just a long pole and a metal box, is staggering. I just wish television could capture white knuckle travel up close.
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I say this from first hand experience. At the 2016 World Indoor Championships. the pole vault was held in front of 7,000 people in a gym where some of us were lucky enough to be there for the action. It was like watching TV in 4K for the first time.
Maybe it’s time for TV directors to up their game. One idea: use drones with HD cameras to better capture speed, athleticism, even goofiness. Everything that makes sports great.
Meanwhile, what Duplantis told me about his early years could also be posted on any pushy parent’s wall. While he broke his first world record at seven, clearing 2.33m, he was never forced to specialize early.
“My parents built the whole installation in the backyard, so we were forced to at least try that,” he told me. “But we played a lot of sports until I was about 15. I played baseball just as much as I did pole vault. Football too.
But I’ve always had a natural drive. I wanted to be the best and I loved the pole vault. My middle brother Antoine never liked it so he just played baseball. And my parents said, “That’s good.”
Yet as the greatest year of his career draws to a close, Duplantis remains determined to push himself to new limits, including one day clearing 6.30m. “It gets harder as the years go by. You won’t have those huge personal achievements and breakthroughs that you had when you were younger.
“But in some ways it becomes more motivating. I’m trying to improve. To stay on the right path. And in the end it’s still the same. It’s always a competition within yourself. Me against the bar, just like it was when I was younger.”
And if history tells us anything, betting against Duplantis never works out well.
