Armand Duplantis breaks pole vault world record again to top off Olympic gold

With Armand Duplantis, the question is never whether he’ll win but how high he’ll fly.

An event that started at 7pm fired to life a couple of hours later when Duplantis cleared 6.00m. Greece’s Emmanouil Karalis tried and failed to match him, as did America’s Sam Kendricks, earning bronze and silver respectively. Which just left the Mondo show.

After some brief hugs with his coach and family to celebrate gold, Duplantis strode across the track and set to work, first breaking the Olympic record of 6.03m set by Thiago Braz in 2016, though you suspect Braz had mentally released that one a while ago. Kendricks geed up the crowd as Duplantis glided over the bar with enough room for a beer belly.

The 24-year-old Swede had broken the world record eight times, pushing the limit of human possibility with a 17-foot tube one centimetre at a time. And here on a sultry night at the Stade de France, at 10.15pm, with the track races long finished and nobody moving an inch, he did it again.

After two failed attempts at a record of 6.25m, he lay down on top of one of those foam back rollers we all have in a cupboard and never use, giving his body every possible chance of bending over the bar.

Then he was standing at the top of the runway with his pole resting on his shoulder for one last try. He took a couple of sharp breaths and muttered “come on” to himself. Then he ran, muscles straining, hair trailing in the wind like Tarzan. He slid his pole into the box and launched into the air in one smooth motion, contorting his body around the bar in a perfect right-angle before whipping his arm away from danger.

He was celebrating before gravity had thrown him onto the mat. Then he was up, letting off a primal roar before rushing off into the arms of his girlfriend, the Swedish model and TikTokker Desire Inglander.

It is ostensibly a silly endeavour, the only track and field event whose most Googled search terms are to ask who invented it and why. But it is also extraordinarily impressive and compelling theatre in equal measure. Essentially what happened here is that 80,000 lost their minds as they watched a Swedish man jump over a large giraffe with nothing but a big stick in his hands.

You can take your pick from his list of records and achievements. At 24, he is already a double Olympic champion. He is a double world champion too. The top 10 clearances in history are all his. My personal favourite is that he hasn’t won silver or bronze since 2019. This was the apex of five years of unfettered dominance.

more to follow…