Athletics: Armand Duplantis, the new pole emperor

Text by: Nicolas Bamba Follow

A week after breaking the pole vault world record, Armand Duplantis improved his performance in Glasgow this Saturday, February 15. The Swede, only 20 years old, hovers over the discipline with a bar at 6.18m. And that only seems to be the beginning of the reign of this insatiable monster.

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His first name is Armand, but he is nicknamed "Mondo". An affectionate little name that sounds good and that, moreover, befits to delight the new phenomenon of athletics. Already, when he raged among the juniors, Armand Duplantis was almost without rival. From now on, the Swede dominates the discipline on a world level. At the start of 2020, the boom operator crushes everything in its path.

On February 8, in Torun in Poland, Armand Duplantis broke Renaud Lavillenie's world record with a successful jump to 6.17m, one centimeter better than the Frenchman in 2014. And on Saturday February 15th, he did it again with a jump to 6.18m in Glasgow on his first try. "Mondo" twice beat the world record in the space of a week: and to say that before that, the world record of Renaud Lavillenie (6.16m) had held six years, and that before that again , the world record of the Ukrainian Sergei Bubka (6.14m) had lasted almost 20 years!

A legend in the making, like Bubka and Bolt

After crossing his bar at 6.18m, to the applause of the audience at the Glasgow meeting, Armand Duplantis imitated the famous break of another precocious phenomenon, that of French football Kylian Mbappé. His perfect jump leaves a smug admiration. The Swede born in Lafayette in Louisiana (United States) seems to have no limits: he spent 6.18m with crazy ease and, above all, with a wide margin.

💥WORLD RECORD💥 @ mondohoss600 breaks the pole vault world record AGAIN.

6.18m.

Incredible. # WorldIndoorTour pic.twitter.com/ZJO8LWq4nM

His performance leaves you dreaming. Obviously, Armand Duplantis has everything to beat the world record several more times and improve it centimeter by centimeter, as illustrated by Sergei Bubka did for ten years. The pole vaulter had improved the world record 17 times between 1984 and 1994, starting his incredible harvest at 5.85m to finish at 6.14m.

When "Mondo" Duplantis had crossed 6.17m on February 8, Damien Inocencio, ex-coach of Renaud Lavillenie, had announced in the columns of the daily Le Monde that the prodigy, although still perfectible, was on the verge of revolutionizing the pole vault: “ It has no limits. All that we imagined as limits in pole vault, with Sergei Bubka and Renaud Lavillenie ... He can explode everything. We can compare it to Usain Bolt; before him, the sprint limits were 9''80 over 100m. And then, Bolt exploded the discipline [the Jamaican holds the world record in 9''58 since 2009, and no sprinter has run in less than 9''69 apart from him, Editor's note]. We have here an athlete who can become a legend. A week later, Duplantis already confirms.

Already focused on the Olympic Games

The new world record holder, born of an American father and a Swedish mother, however, tempers the euphoria which surrounds him and recalls that the perceived ease in Glasgow is only an illusion. " These are years of hard work, when it sounds simple today, " he told the BBC. But make no mistake: the junior world champion (5.30m in 2015, aged 15 and a half) has an appetite at least as great as his talent. And that's good, because the Tokyo Olympics are fast approaching (from July 24 to August 9).

At only 20 years old, the Swedish Armand Duplantis crushes the pole vault competition at the start of 2020. Lee Smith / Reuters

“ I am very excited about this season with the Olympics. I hope to pass my best competition there. It is a good start to the season, but it is the Games that I want to succeed, ”announces the pole vaulter, who can become the first Swede in gold in this discipline at the Olympic Games.

On the palmares side, the medals should quickly rain as much as the world records. In 2018 in Berlin, Armand Duplantis had already burst the screen by becoming, at only 18 years old, the youngest European champion in history (all competitions combined) with a jump to 6.05m and three junior world records beaten successively. In 2019, the Swede missed world gold by very little and had to settle for the money behind the American Sam Kendricks. Today, with his latest progress, Armand "Mondo" Duplantis is the undisputed patron of pole vaulting. His elders seem far from his level. The supremacy of Duplantis is probably just beginning.

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