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At the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Oregon, Armand Mondo Duplantis of Sweden won the pole vault gold medal and shattered the previous record. He lifted the bar to leap over 6.21 meters and improved by one centimetre his previous record (established in March 2022) to win the first global title of his career.
The Swedish athlete enjoyed a spectacular season where he broke the world record three times. His crowning achievement was to become the world champion with a world record.
Who is Mondo Duplantis?
Born in Sweden on November 10, 1999, Armand Gustav 'Mondo' Duplantis holds the indoor and outdoor world record for the pole vault, with heights of 6.20 meters and 6.21 meters, respectively. He is also the reigning Olympic and world champion.
His father, Greg Duplantis, an American of Cajun and Finnish ancestry, used to pole vault, reaching a height of 5.80 meters (19 feet and 12 inches), while his Swedish mother Helena (née Hedlund), a former heptathlete and volleyball player, was also an athlete.
Along with his younger sister Johanna, his two older brothers Andreas and Antoine also became athletes. Antoine switched from pole vault to baseball in high school before enrolling at Louisiana State University, where he became the team's career hit leader in 2019. Andreas represented Sweden as a pole vaulter in the 2009 World Youth Championships and the 2012 World Junior Championships.
Duplantis, who was born in Louisiana and now resides in Stockholm, has broken the indoor and outdoor world record six times in the previous two-and-a-half years.
Mondo Duplantis' record-breaking spree
Mondo Duplantis established national freshman records both indoors and outdoors during his first year at Lafayette High School in 2015. This earned him the title of Gatorade Louisiana Boys Track and Field Athlete of the Year.
Duplantis competed for Sweden for the first time at the 2015 World Youth Championships in Cali, Colombia. He set a new championship record and improved his personal best by two centimeters, with a first-attempt clearance of 5.30 meters, earning him the gold medal on countback.
On February 6, 2016, at a high school competition in Baton Rouge, the young prodigy cleared 5.49 meters, or 18 ft and 0 inches. He thus set new records for the age-16 category, the global indoor youth record, and the national high school indoor record. He was the first athlete to leap 18 feet indoors.
Mondo Duplantis established the world indoor junior record with a leap of 5.75 meters on February 11, 2017, at the Millrose Games. In his first competition of the year on February 4, 2020, he cleared 6.00 meters (19 feet 8 inches) indoors. He then made three attempts to set a new world record of 6.17 meters (20 feet 3 inches).
The rising star then broke his own world record by leaping 6.19 meters (20 feet, 3+1/2 inches) at the Belgrade Indoor Meeting on March 7, 2022. He won the gold medal two weeks later in Belgrade, Serbia, at the 2022 World Athletics Indoor Championships. He also beat his world record by leaping 6.20 meters at the same time (20 feet 4 inches).
Like the great Sergey Bubka before him, Mondo Duplantis has made breaking world records his trademark. You cannot take away from the athletic brilliance of someone who has literally and figuratively raised the bar in his sport.
