Armand Duplantis flies far above the fray despite a very tough finish

These nineteenth world championships offered magnificent contrasts, crowning unexpected champions and conversely dethroning ultra-favorite athletes. Again on Friday, the triple jumper Yulimar Rojas, undefeated since 2017 in the big championship, almost stumbled before recovering in extremis on her last jump.

Saturday, at the end of the Hungarian perch, no one imagined a defeat for Armand Duplantis. Surprises and disappointments are not on the Swedish-American pole vault champion’s horizon. The 23-year-old world champion retained his title after a superb final where two pole vaulters cleared at least six meters.

He won thanks to a bar at 6.10 meters in front of the Filipino Ernest John Obiena (6 meters). Australian Kurtis Marschall and American Christopher Nilsen tied for third in 5.95m. A leading time in the competition, Frenchman Thibaut Collet was the fifth pole vaulter to pass at least 5.90 meters (unprecedented in the world championship), beating his personal best by 8 centimeters. He took a promising fifth place at 24.

For five years, Duplantis has imposed such domination on his discipline, pushed back the human limits of his sport to such a level, that one has the impression of having known only him, triumphant pole in hand at the end of each contest as a never-ending story.

The other competitors, even those who have joined the six-meter club, are reduced to doing extras. “The boss now is Mondo”, as his friend and mentor Renaud Lavillenie expressed with a mixture of resignation and admiration in February 2020. In Budapest, in the final, his opponents tried everything in their power to disrupt him. They were three to cross like him 5.95 meters on the first try: the Filipino Ernest John Obiena, the Australian Kurtis Marschall and the American Christopher Nilsen.

When his three rivals all missed their first attempt at 6 meters – Obiena, vice-world champion, crossed this bar on his second attempt – Duplantis flew over this mythical height from the start with unequaled ease and a disconcerting margin, his 67th jump six meters or more. Then, like others, he swallowed their espresso at the two-bar counter at 6.05 meters and 6.10 meters.

mountaineer pole vaulter

These heights are part of his daily life, they belong to his world. The world of “Mondo” is that of a pole vaulter who always has to conquer higher peaks. And this time around, he failed to reach his Everest, failing three times to better his world record to 6.23 meters.

Last year, Duplantis broke three world records: two this winter indoors (6.19 meters and 6.20 meters) and one outdoors in Oregon during the Worlds in 6.21 meters. This year, he had once again improved the indoor record to raise it to 6.22 meters in February in Clermont-Ferrand. His first world record dates from February 8, 2020, at the time the young impudent erased from the shelves his predecessor Lavillenie (6.17 meters against 6.16 meters), the very one who had supplanted Tsar Sergei Bubka.

In 2017, not yet of age, Armand Duplantis, 9th, had a discreet first in London during his first world championships. A year later, at only 18, he made everyone agree by passing 6.05 meters in the final of the European Championships in Berlin. At the same age, Renaud Lavillenie only jumped 4.81 meters and Sergei Bubka “only” 5.40 meters.

In 2019 in Doha, when he gave up his student status at Louisiana State University (LSU) only a few months ago, he continued his apprenticeship – second in a championship won by Sam Kendricks – and conferred on the adversity a last crumb before crushing it with its future glory.

Born in Lafayette, Louisiana, Armand Duplantis is a child of the ball. His father Greg was an honest pole vaulter of modest size with a record at 5.80 meters, his mother Helena, a talented and great Scandinavian heptathlete. The little ” devil “ grew up a pole in his hand in his garden in Lafayette. His older brother, Andreas, also jumped. From the age of four, in a family troop mimicry, little Mondo imitated him during his first jumps.

Greg Duplantis is his lifelong coach when it comes to his pole vault technique. Since he started to work on his physical preparation, his mother takes care of it, in addition to working on his run-up. “He has my long legs and my long arms but he gets his speed and his mentality from his dad”confided to the World in 2019 the slender Helena Duplantis.

child of the ball

Before he broke his senior world records but when he was already European champion and junior world record holder, Armand Duplantis scoured the university meetings of the NCAA championship. Under the banner of LSU, he crossed world-class bars in a general indifference in a 5,000-seat stadium, in the shadow of the gigantic enclosure of more than 100,000 places of US footballers, stars of the university of Louisiana.

Imperturbable, smiling and sure of his strength and his talent, the little pole vaulting genius divides his time between Stockholm and Louisiana when he is not scouring meetings and competitions. “He doesn’t really like noveltyexplained Helena Duplantis to AFP before these Worlds, He doesn’t like to do new scale exercises in training just for a change. He doesn’t mind repeating things, preparing like this, month after month. »

After all, why change a winning method? Now double world champion, Armand Duplantis is heading straight for a second Olympic title next year in Paris. A feat that even Bubka and Lavillenie, titled only once, have never achieved and which would make him join the American Bob Richards, two gold medals in 1948 and 1956 which earned him the nickname of “flying pastor. For Mondo, there are no limits.