Duplantis wants to fight for the ‘Oscars’ of sport with Messi: he has once again broken his own world record in the pole vault

The outstanding Swedish athlete Armand “Mondo” Duplantis elevated to 6 meters and 22 centimeters his world record pole vaultwinning this test during the indoor meeting in Clermont-Ferrand, France, this Saturday, a few days after being shortlisted for the awards laureusthe ‘Oscars’ of sport, together with the Argentine soccer world champion Lionel Messi.

Duplantis, the son of a former world-class pole vaulter, is 23 years old and is the Olympic champion in the specialty, as well as the 2022 Oregon world champion.

In recent weeks he had been trying to achieve this score of 6.22, which he finally achieved, after winning the meetings in Uppsala with 6.10 and Berlin with 6.06, among others.

In Clermont-Ferrand he started with a jump of 5.71, which he passed without difficulty. It took him two tries at 5.81, while he cleared 6.01 on his first attempt. About 6.22 of the record, he failed in the first two jumps, but finally reached his goal in the third and final. the Australian Kurtis Marshall, Commonwealth champion, finished second with 5.91m. and the third was Dutch Minus Vlone with 5.91.

With this tournament, Duplantis already has 60 competitions in which he has jumped 6 meters or more – a very impressive figure. And he sets out to emulate the Ukrainian Sergei Bubka as the greatest pole vaulters in history.

Duplantis achieved his first world record in February 2020 in Torun (Poloni) when he cleared 6.17m. (The previous vote was by the Frenchman Renaud Lavillenie with 6.16 since 2014). The following week Duplantis clocked 6.18 in Glasgow. The pandemic stopped the races that year, but already on March 7, 2022 in Belgrade Duplantis resumed his “recordman” pace and jumped 6.19. Thirteen days later in the same city, at the World Indoor Championships, he reaches 6.20. And in July, during the outdoor World Cup in Oregon, he hit 6.21.

In the jumping and throwing events, a single table of records is keptwhether they are made outdoors or indoors.

Greg Duplantis, the father of ‘Mondo’, was a world-class pole vaulter in the 1990s with a best mark of 5.80m. in 1993 he and his wife Helena Hedlund – the mother of “Mondo” excelled in the heptathlon and volleyball, before dedicating himself to his profession as a dietician. Lars-Ake Hedlund, Helena’s father, was director of an athletic club in Sweden.

“Mondo” began to shine in pole vaulting from a very young age and, above all, when he entered the University of Louisiana, in the USA, born in that country (Lafayette, Louisiana, on 10-11-1999) but has always represented in Sweden.