ABBA is playing. Dancing Queen. Around a bend, Mondo, the King, dances wrapped in the Swedish flag. He is 24 years old. He is a pole vaulter. Higher than anyone else. He took the world record with 6.17m four and a half years ago. In Paris, in a Stade de France full of people, 75,000 pairs of eyes, and mobile phones, fixed only on him, he beats it for the tenth time, leaving it at 6.25m, after having won his second Olympic Games. A UFO has been seen. The stadium explodes in ecstasy. Ecstasy is multiplied, after the ritual bell rings, by Raffaella Carrá’s Pedro, Pedro, Pedro Pé. Paris is a party. And Mondo is a magnificent disc jockey.
Mondo Duplantis is the Mozart of the pole vault, as Anquetil was of cycling, with an innate talent for making music with a broomstick in New Orleans, a unique desire to always be one step ahead of others on a different path, a sign of all geniuses, and parents who nurture him, taking him from fair to fair, exhibiting him, videos on the networks documenting all his progress as a child prodigy. No one would argue with that, although it would be quite difficult to imagine the child genius from Salzburg spending hours and hours lying on the purple Mondo in a corner of the stadium, his back uncomfortable on a thick cylinder, almost in bored contemplation of the flight of flies. Not a breath of wind. Heavy heat.
A sudden explosion at the age of 18, with a European title at 6.05m. Then, a year of trial and error, before he put everything back into place with consistency and reliability in 2019, and a silver at the World Championships in Doha, where Sam Kendricks beat him tied at 5.97m, by fewer attempts. Then, a hurricane. In his last six major finals since Tokyo, Duplantis has won six times over 6m (between 6.02m and 6.20m), attempted the world record five times and broken it twice, and cleared 6.20m four times. To win these six golds, he cleared the bar 25 times on the first attempt and only once on the second.
Around his bubble, nothing is still. His pole vaulters toil, sweat, suffer, get stressed, knock down. Little by little they disappear from his surroundings. In the ring of the track, things keep happening. The 3,000m steeplechase athletes fight to reach the final, and Dani Arce, from Cardeñadijo, Burgos, is the only European among the 15 to make it, and the sprinters, kings and queens of the 100m, non-stop, accumulate series of 200m, Tebogo, Charamba, Noah Lyles, Julien Alfred, Erriyon Knighton, Gaby Thomas, enter and leave his visual plane fleetingly. Once the sun had set, the women in the 5,000m raced at a slower pace, but not too slow, for 11 and a half laps of the track, followed by one more, the last one, in 57.85 seconds, in a frenetic sprint, neck and neck between Faith Kipyegon and Beatrice Chebet, before the latter, the young woman becoming the new Olympic champion, won (14m 28.56s).
The hyperactive Mozart that he was, would surely interfere, run, jump over the river, laugh, shout… The Mondo who calmly waits for his moment to really act, changes his posture from time to time, or gets up, slowly, with the orange pumas in his hand, to cross the track to talk with his coaches, who are his parents, Greg and Helena, sitting in the first row of the stands, or asks the judge for permission to go to the bathroom or tells himself some funny story like his Greek friend Manolo Karalis who does a series of five jumps without errors up to 5.90m, like, almost, the American Sam Kendricks or the Filipino EJ Obiena, student of Vitaly Petrov, the creator of Isinbayeva. He puts on his shoes, takes off his shoes. And he does it all without fuss.
And sometimes, to keep from cooling down, he jumps. In the first two hours of the competition he does it only twice, with the bar at 5.70m and then at 5.85m. At the beginning of the third hour, 5.95m. He clears the bar as easily as his rivals do, jubilant when they touch his limits and surpass them, the bar trembling. Duplantis has not even come close to his own. Seeing him next to them, no one thinks of achieving anything other than a personal best or a silver medal. They respect Duplantis as if he were an object from another planet, one whose kingdom, according to the will, is not of this world. The books say that the pole vault is unique in athletics because it is an object rather than a jump, but they could all be rewritten, the pole is first and foremost him, Mondo, 24 years old, a normal physique – 1.83m, 79 kilos – who came into the world with the pole, the object, in his genes, a long, thin cylinder, more than five metres, and so hard that it takes strength and speed to bend it, which requires a Mondo. The most unpredictable specialty, most subject to the elements, rain, wind, minimal discomfort, moods, sensations, Mondo has turned it into an exact science. Energy, power, kinetic energy. With his third attempt, 6.00m as it could have been 6.20, from such a distance he cleared his chest over the bar, he was already proclaimed Olympic champion, as in Tokyo three years ago. He is, after the American Bob Richards (champion in Helsinki 52 and Melbourne 56), the first pole vaulter with two Olympic titles.
Karalis (5.90m) took bronze; Kendricks (5.95m) took silver, knocking the ball down from 6m away at the same moment as her compatriot Valarie Allmann rang the bell as Olympic discus champion (69.50m), repeating her victory in Tokyo. Five minutes later, the British Keely Hodgkinson, twice second at the World Championships, silver in Tokyo, finally won gold in the 800m with 1m 56.72s (front runner: 58.30s + 58.42s).
At 9.45pm, Mondo asks for the bar to be raised to 6.10m. He breaks the Olympic record. He doesn’t miss a single detail. The night has to end with a victory and a record. If the world record doesn’t fall, the Olympian assures. He celebrates by imitating the shot of a Turkish gunman that has gone viral at the Games. “It just happened. I just did it, I thought it was something fun to do something silly and cocky,” he explains. “After the world record, the reaction can’t be pre-prepared nonsense, but simply overflowing with emotions, freaking out. I’ve been lucky enough to do it several times already, but each time the feeling is more or less the same. This was a more extreme version. When I go over the bar it’s like it’s artificial intelligence, it doesn’t seem real. That was more hysteria and freaking out.”
Nobody runs or throws anymore. The whole stadium is for him, for the UFO. Nobody leaves. He asks for 6.25m. World record. At 10:00 p.m. he touches the bar just a little, just enough for it to shake and fall. At 10:05 p.m., his show is interrupted. Valery Borzov, the Soviet Olympic champion in Moscow 80, hands the 100m gold medal to Noah Lyles. After the home of the brave, at 10:10 p.m., a second attempt nailed to the first. At exactly 10:18 p.m., three hours and 18 minutes after the start of the competition, Mondo runs for the eighth time that night, 20 paces to cover the 45 metres to the bar, carrying the two kilos of the pole, before sticking it securely into the box, beginning to bend it before lifting his feet off the ground, a smooth, fluid take-off, and shooting off to meet the demands of physics, and demonstrate to the atheists that the dynamic transformation of energy is possible. Even if it is done by someone who comes from space in a yellow UFO shaped like a pole.
Armand Duplantis in the centre with his Gold medal, surrounded by Sam Kendricks, Silver medal and Emmanouil Karalis, Bronze medal.Aleksandra Szmigiel (REUTERS)
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