Mastering the impossible: Inside the record-breaking world of pole vaulter Mondo Duplantis
Summary
Swedish-American pole vaulter Mondo Duplantis has been the standout athlete of 2024, for which he was awarded the Laureus Sportsman of the Year recently. Lounge caught up with Duplantis for an exclusive interview
In 2024, there were athletes, and then there was Mondo Duplantis.
To describe that season, words are hard to come by, and Duplantis himself mutters things like “weird" and “surreal".
But if there’s one word that, casting aside superlatives, captures the essence of the 25-year-old Swedish-American pole vaulter’s year—15 wins in 15 competitions, world champion, European Champion, Olympic champion, and three-time world record breaker—it’s this: impossible.
Any athlete operating in the top tier would like to believe that they are chasing the impossible, that they are on a quest to turn dreams into reality.
Once in a generation, that really happens. Duplantis belongs, with consummate ease, in the same sphere as Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Simone Biles and Eliud Kipchoge. So far ahead of the rest that during the Paris Olympics, with the pole vault competition done—in fact all events for the day were over—and the gold in his pocket, Duplantis, who still had a couple of jumps left, if he wished to take them, decided to go for the world record.
More than 77,000 people inside the sweltering, heaving Stade De France roared and chanted—Mondo, Mondo, Mondo. Even his opponents, the entire pool of finalists in the men’s pole vault, stood on the sidelines egging him on. He had won the Olympic gold with a 6.0m jump, so he first loosened up with a 6.10m jump to set the Olympic record. Then he raised the bar to 6.25m, jack-knifed and soared over it like only he can, accompanied by a deafening wall of sound, to break the world record for the ninth time.
Duplantis had become the first man to break the pole vault world record in an Olympic final and the first to win back-to-back Olympic golds in the event since US’s Bob Richards in 1952 and 1956.
By the time I meet him, on the sidelines of the Laureus Sports Awards on a cool April day in Madrid this year, Duplantis had broken the world record twice more (it stands at 6.27m now), and had been unbeaten since 2023.
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“But Paris…man, it’s hard to beat Paris," he says, lounging on a sofa in blue denim, sneakers and a flowy slate-grey cotton shirt with a Cuban collar. “The way the stars aligned for me that night…I was on a different planet, it was weird. It was such an overwhelming, surreal and life-changing moment, it was hard to take it all in. The craziest moment I had in my career for sure."
A striking development in the world of sports, very visible at the Paris Olympics, is the newfound camaraderie between rivals. Neeraj Chopra and his Pakistani rival Arshad Nadeem (silver and gold in javelin) are fast friends, the American gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles bowed to Brazilian gymnast Rebecca Andrade when the latter won the gold in the floor event, and all of Duplantis’s rivals lined up to cheer him on to the world record.
“In our instances, it’s a very individual sport which I think helps to bring everybody together," Duplantis says. “Because whatever the person on the other side does, it’s not going to affect me or my performance. It’s just a competition within yourself, just against the bar. Particularly with pole vaulting—it’s just a strange and crazy event that attracts people who are kind of weird in their own way to even dare to do it."
Pole vaulting is a strange sport, no two ways about it. It requires the speed and power of a sprinter, and the coordination and daredevilry of a gymnast. It is highly dangerous—the athlete pummels down a track at full speed holding a pole that’s a little over 19ft long, which they then ram into a hole (called a “box"), to flip themselves over a bar that, at the elite level, is 19ft high or more. Pole vaulting has been around since at least 2500 BC, when the ancient Egyptians used poles to reach enemy battlements or cross a hurdle, but it’s safe to say that no one in those thousands of years has managed to soar to Duplantis’s heights.
Yet fear is not part of his emotional spectrum when it comes to pole vaulting.
“You always have a bit of a mental barrier when you are jumping, specially when you are trying a new height," Duplantis said. “But I was always quite good at it. My father, who was my coach, never had to help me overcome any fear. The main thing for him was…if something happened like I broke a pole or had a bad jump, it was really important for him to try and make sure that we ended the session on a good jump, ended with a good taste in my mouth. You only ever remember your last jump, that’s the beautiful thing about it."
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When Duplantis says that he was always good at it, what he means is that he has been jumping since he was a toddler. He was only four when his father Greg, a college-level pole-vaulter in the US, built him a backyard facility at their home in Lafayatte, Louisiana, and taught him the sport (it may be pointless to try and explain how someone gets to such rarefied levels of accomplishment in any field, but in sports, you can bet genetics has something to do with it—Duplantis’s mother Helena is a former heptathlete from Sweden, which is also why Duplantis chose to represent Sweden instead of the US while in his teens).
“I grew up idolising my dad," Duplantis says, “he just has so much love for sports and for pole vaulting that it just rubbed off on me and I think that’s a big part of how I was able to get attached to it at such an young age. Of course he was the one who introduced me to it, but then also the way he was obsessed with it, that’s something we bonded over."
As he grew up, Duplantis says, his relationship with his father became less like that of a child and his parent and more like “best friends, or brothers, in a way…
“I follow his advice and guidance all the time, but at the same time, he has let me figure out my own path in such a beautiful way."
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The backyard set-up still exists in their sprawling garden—more a forest than a garden, in the way that everything grows in wild profusion in the rainy, humid and hot climate of Louisiana. It consists of a running track which was once just packed earth but is now only slightly more upgraded with a metal track overlaid with plywood and foam, ending in a landing pad and the bar. Vines and ferns encroach from all sides. And one side of the track has the neighbour’s brick wall, padded with discarded mattresses if Duplantis was to suffer a fall. But even here, Duplantis cleared world record heights multiple times while isolating himself and preparing for the Tokyo Olympics in the middle of the pandemic.
What does it feel like, I ask him, to break the world record so many times?
“It’s difficult to explain…people look at it two or three centimetres, but man that’s a big gap," he says. “When I first broke the world record with 6.17 (in 2020) to now at 6.27, those 10 centimetres are light years away, a completely different level of jump. Each time it becomes exponentially harder for me. I’m just creeping up I guess. Each time it requires me to be better at everything, every aspect of the jump, and I have to find little details that I can refine to get to those extra centimetres."
But is 6.28 just around the corner?
“Oh yes," he smiles, “I think that’s coming soon."
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of The Beast Within, a detective novel set in Delhi.
