This time, he only touched the bar lightly with his chest before clearing it at the first attempt at 6.31m, a new world record. It was the 15th world record set by the greatest star the sport has produced since Jamaican Usain Bolt retired at the 2017 World Championships in London.
The Swedish pole vaulter signed an impeccable competition with four valid jumps over 5.65, 5.90, 6.08 and the aforementioned 6.31. And he did it at home, at the Mondo Classic in Uppsala (Sweden) while in the background his latest musical success, ‘Feeling Myself’, was playing. Could you ask for more?
It is the second time that ‘Mondo’ Duplantis has broken the world record on Swedish soil after clearing 6.28m at the Olympiastadion in Stockholm on 15 June 2025, at a Diamond League meeting.
The Lafayette, Louisiana-born athlete – whose father is American and mother Swedish – set his first world record on February 8, 2020 in Torun, the Polish city where he will seek his fourth indoor world title in a week’s time.
He was going to arrive there without the best record of the year for the first time in a long time after the 6.17m of the Greek Emmanouil ‘Manolo’ Karalis, which allows him to be second in the all-time list ahead of the mythical Sergey Bubka and the Frenchman Renaud Lavillenie.
Duplantis had only jumped once this season, at the All Star Perche in Clermont-Ferrand, where he won with a mark of 6.06. And all this in a year with six men above the psychological barrier of six metres. This has never been seen before in this explosive and wonderful athletic discipline.
With these incentives, the double Olympic and triple world champion – it was in Tokyo 2025 where he first broke the 6.30 meters barrier – was competing in a meeting tailor-made for him, in which he had accomplished rivals such as Karalis himself, Norway’s Sondre Guttormsen, who finished second tonight with exactly six meters, or the AmericanSam Kendricks, the last man to beat him in a major competition during the World Championships in Doha in 2019.
None of this was enough to put in doubt a reign that is consolidating with the passage of time and seems to have no limits, because centimeter by centimeter, like a supersonic ant, Duplantis, 26, is determined to conquer the sky and there is no barrier that can resist him, to the point of already speculating with 6.40 meters when he has barely broken the 6.30.
And on top of that, the guy sings and composes well. No wonder he is the idol that a sport like athletics always needs.