Why This Pole Vaulter Is Even Bigger Than the One With the Bulge

If you watched one pole vaulter this week, it was probably French Olympian Anthony Ammirati, who became a viral sensation when his manhood tipped the crossbar and saw him prematurely ejected from the Games.

But there's another story to tell about a pole vaulter whose package went unnoticed as he soared 20 feet, six inches into the air, landing the Olympic gold medal, breaking his 9th world record, and establishing himself as the most dominant athlete in his field—if not track and field more broadly.

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Armand “Mondo” Duplantis is the GOAT in an obscure activity that dates back to ancient Greece, when soldiers used spears to overleap obstacles like fortifications. At age 24, he is poised to become one of the most famous Swedish brands since Volvo or ABBA. In the words of The New Yorker, Mondo is "the Timothée Chalamet of the pole vault," blessed with good cheekbones and whole lot more.

Duplantis wasn't born in Scandinavia. Far from it. He grew up in the American South, seemingly predestined for this golden moment. He was raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, with a Cajun accent and a Swedish passport. His father and coach was a world-class pole vaulter who competed in four US Olympic trials. His mother and trainer was a Swedish volleyball player and a heptathlete.

Naturally, he began pole vaulting at age four in his yard, after his father installed a dirt runway, foam pit, and bar made from oil field pipes.

“I fell in love with it from the very beginning,” Duplantis told an interviewer in 2017. He began competing at age six. By 10, he set his first age group world record. (He is still the world record holder for all age groups below 12.)

High school was a blur of championships and junior world records.

When he headed to Louisiana State University (both his parents’ alma mater) in 2019, as a top recruit for track and field, he became friends with Olympic sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson. He lasted a year before devoting himself full time to pole vaulting.

Sweden recruited Duplantis when he was a 16-year-old teen, sweetening the deal by offering his father a job as his coach—a parental/professional crossover not allowed by Team USA. (Selection for the Swedish national team is also based on athletes’ overall records, rather than the highly competitive trials would-be American Olympians must undergo.)

Pole vaulting is a competition in which athletes try to leap over a bar typically set in a height range equivalent to that of adult giraffes. Medals are usually won by margins of a centimeter (0.4 inches), the width of a button or a pencil. But Duplantis bests his peers by almost a foot—a staggering gap.

Duplantis won gold in Tokyo in 2021 and holds four world titles. He has made nine of the top ten jumps of all time.

How—and why—is he so good at his sport? The answer is mainly his blazing speed, but it’s more complicated.

David Young, a professor of physics at LSU, told The Athletic that elite pole vaulters need four skills to succeed: “The speed of a world-class sprinter, the ability of a long jumper, the agility of a gymnast and the flexibility of a ballerina.”

Going into the 2024 Games, Duplantis held the world record at 20 feet, 5 ¾ inches—a figure that puts him in a class of his own. He had won almost before he even started. And that’s actually his greatest challenge in competition: He must first dispatch his immediate rivals, and then he must take on history.

And so on the world’s biggest stage in Paris, Duplantis clinched the gold medal easily—then he was ready for something that had never been done before. The bar was set at a new world record mark. Mondo tried once. He failed. He tried again. He failed. Before his third attempt, he consulted with his father and made tactical adjustments to the standards that hold the crossbar in place. And then he took off with his neon carbon fiber pole.

The crowd of 80,000 at Stade de France watched as he sailed over the bar at 20 feet, six inches, landed in the pit, and ran to the stands to kiss his 23-year-old girlfriend, a Swedish fashion model and influencer, and to hug his brothers and parents.

How did it feel to set a new world record—for the ninth time—and win gold by nearly 12 inches?

“I felt like I had already been in this moment 1,000 times,” Duplantis said, recalling all those times in his yard with his dad in Lafayette. So what’s next? His life is already pretty amazing. He’s a huge celebrity in Sweden, where billboards feature his face and endorsements for Puma, Red Bull, Omega and the electric vehicle company Polestar. New sponsors are lining up.

Of course, the financial rewards of pole vaulting aren’t exactly the same as pro soccer or basketball, but Duplantis earns sponsorship bonuses of $30,000 to $100,000 each time he breaks the world record. As a result, he is purposeful about raising the bar in small increments and setting new records as often as he can. “I think I would be lying if I didn’t say that was a part of it,” Mondo told TIME magazine before the Olympics. So one thing is certain. Methodically, Mondo will keep raising the bar and reaching for the sky, centimeter by centimeter.