Finally, Mondo Duplantis has the spotlight. The formalities on the track have been dispensed with, Keely Hodgkinson has won her gold medal, Noah Lyles has been awarded his, and for the first time this evening all eyes are on a 24-year-old from Sweden via Louisiana, the bar suspended 6.25m high and the still, warm air between them.
Duplantis has already won his gold medal, his second in a row. Nobody really cares about that part very much. He had to jump four times to win the competition, and it turns out it didn’t really need to do the first two, or the fourth. It’s a little like the bit at the end of Eurovision where the winner gets to play again, except the winner is The Beatles, and the winning song was Octopus’s Garden, and now they’re going to play the whole of Sgt Pepper as an encore.
But when you have just won your 18th straight meet, hold nine of 10 highest vaults in history and eight world records in four years, you get graded on a slightly different curve. And so the night has sharpened to the duel everyone wanted to see: Duplantis v gravity, Duplantis v the laws of physics, Duplantis now v Duplantis four months ago, when he set his last world record of 6.24m. The bar is at 6.25m.
He starts with two failures. It feels ridiculous to nitpick at a double Olympic champion for not breaking the world record. But there is a rare opportunity here. An opportunity to give these Games a genuinely historic moment. Not to mention the pole vault, a sport whose popularity and reach has always been somewhat restricted by its own basic weirdness.
This is, after all, an event that few lay people can really grasp and even fewer have performed to competence. The bar to entry – pun intended – is dauntingly high. Duplantis was the son of a pole vaulter, started vaulting at the age of four in his back garden. Which – not to get all Malcolm Gladwell about this – certainly doesn’t hurt.
But the immense skill, the freakish physical conditioning, those 20 perfect strides performed at sprint speed, the strength and height of the grip, the way his hands respond to the “feel” of the pole as it slides into the back of the plate, the gymnast’s flexibility to propel himself not just over the bar but around it, all while wielding a prop from a Laurel and Hardy movie: this, perhaps, is the part people overlook.
Duplantis can be that crossover figure. Duplantis, with his floppy hair and haunting eyes and preppy fashion choices, like Withnail played by Timothée Chalamet in a Vampire Weekend video, can give the pole vault its crowning glory. Like the legendary Sergey Bubka before him, Duplantis is on a handsome cash bonus for every world record he breaks. Over the last 40 years, the pair of them have broken the world record 25 times, most of them by a centimetre at a time. But none of those ever came in an Olympics.
As they come out for the warm-up, the other vaulters have backpacks and Duplantis has a designer wheelie-suitcase. There are very few events where you can tell who’s going to win from the way they come out to warm up. But here a complete pole vault newcomer would instantly clock the lineup and go: yeah, it’s the guy with the designer wheelie-suitcase, isn’t it?
Then comes the long wait. And being Armand “Mondo” Duplantis involves quite a lot of waiting. He is the only competitor to skip the first height of 5.50m, sitting on the floor while the others have a go, drumming his knees in time to the stadium music. He clears 5.70m like he’s basically stepping over a cat. Passes 5.80m. Sails over 5.85m with such ease that had he wanted to knock the bar over with his hand, it’s not immediately clear he could have reached it.
Sam Kendricks of the United States and Emmanouil Karalis of Greece both clear 5.90m and tear off into the crowd with full-on football celebrations. Duplantis passes 5.90m – good banter, this – before vaulting 5.95m while smoking a cigarillo. And little of this passes with any fanfare. Really this is an event that takes place on the off-beats, something that tends to happen while bigger, louder things are happening nearby. An Olympic record of 6.10m is shattered in the scruffy swash of Hodgkinson’s noise.
Now, at long last, Duplantis has the spotlight. It’s his third and final attempt. The roar is humongous, and focused on him alone. He sets off. In a few seconds he will be earthbound and away, into the crowd, the star of the greatest show on earth.
But let’s leave him right here, sailing through clean clear air, higher than any human before him, a man flying beyond the earthly plane and into immortality.
