News

Few events in athletics are more spectacular than pole vault. With high knees and a five-metre long “tube” in your hands, you run at it, defying the laws of physics, and then, for a moment, standing on your hands on top of the pole, you leap over a bar three and a half storeys high. Armand Duplantis is the greatest ever classic of this form of motion, and on 8 August in Székesfehérvár we will be able to admire him for ourselves.

Who would have thought, even five or ten years ago, that in the 2020s there would be a boy who, just a few months before his 23rd birthday, would have jumped over 6.00 metres more times than the legendary Sergey Bubka. Duplantis did it for the 47th time in the World Championships final, another important indicator that put him ahead of his great predecessor.

“He’s an amazing athlete who’s bringing a fresh spirit to pole vaulting.” “6.20? 6.25? For me, he is ready for that today.” Now he is a big star,” Bubka said of the young Swedish-American two years ago. This year Duplantis reached the heights predicted by the former world record holder.

Six-time world champion Bubka previously broke the world record of pole vault 35 times. Duplantis reached the world record of 6.21m on Sunday in the USA, advancing from 6.17m centimetre to centimetre. This was his 7th record breaking success, counting indoor and outdoor results separately. And 99% sure it won’t be his last!

Mondo, born into a family of true sportsmen, was born in the United States on 10 November 1999. His mother, Helena, a former heptathlonist and volleyball player, chose to become a Swedish citizen because of her origins. Through his father, he might also call himself a Cajun – a group of people who can be traced back to the French colonial period in the state of Lousiana.

Considering that his father Greg, who was also one of Bubka’s rivals, had a personal best of 5.80 metres, it is not so surprising to see how high young Mondo was at the age of seven. At the 2015 Junior World Championships, he broke the competition record with 5.30m at the age of 15.

A little comparison: Bubka’s first outdoor world record of 5.85 metres was broken at the age of 20 years and 174 days. That means that he set the record at a younger age than Duplantis, who was 20 years and 312 days old in Rome.

However, Duplantis was only 17 years and 142 days old when he surpassed the 5.85 metres that was considered the greatest jump of all time in the spring of 1984. Just three and a half years later, he had reached 6.15 metres, which was enough to overshadow the entire lifetime achievement of Bubka, who was considered the greatest genius of the discipline.

At Hayward Field, he beat silver medallist Christopher Nielsen by 27 centimetres, so it’s no exaggeration to say that he played in a completely different league at the World Championships, as usual. After his undefeated season in 2020, he was beaten in two Diamond League events (Gateshead and Lausanne) last year, but he can say he is unbeaten again in 2022. In this period, he has won 44 times out of 46 starts, which means he has won 95% of his races.

With the success of this year’s World Indoor and Outdoor Championships, Duplantis now has gold medals from all the major world championships. The sky really is the limit from here, and he can take another step towards it in Székesfehérvár. The bar has never been so high in Hungary as it will be on 8 August!

 

Photo: Christian Pedersen / Getty Images