The Swedish pole vault superstar opens up about what went into his Olympic triumph in Paris
Mondo Duplantis is back at work. After a four-week hiatus that followed the summer of his life, the man upon whose every move the Stade de France crowd hung on a sultry night in early August has begun grafting away on the follow-up.
When he sits down to talk with AW over a video call from Louisiana, he is a handful of weeks back into full training and in search of that feeling of physical sharpness, speed and power he had been able call upon at the crucial moments only a few months previously.
He has rid himself of the “weird obsession” with fried chicken that developed as he let the strict diet slide during his time off. Now it’s a hunger of a very different sort that he is looking to satisfy.
Mondo Duplantis (Getty)
“It’s funny,” says the man who retained his world indoor, European and Olympic pole vault titles, as well as breaking his own world record no fewer than three times over the course of 2024. “I did everything [I wanted to during this] last year and I really couldn’t have written the story any better. It was exactly how I envisioned it. But then you start training again, you feel like you’re not in good shape and then you’re frustrated. I feel pretty good jumping, but I’m just not in the same shape that I was in in August.
“There is something nice about it, though. It keeps the motivation so high and, for me right now, it’s like it doesn’t matter what I did [during this] last year, in a way. Of course, I’m super grateful for it and it’s amazing, but I have to make sure I keep performing. I want to make sure that I’m still dominant.”
Duplantis is someone who likes to live in the moment. In fact it’s a job requirement for someone who can face lengthy waits between jumps during a major championships (we’ll come back to that later) so he admits it has only been recently, having picked up a pole again, that something has occurred to him.
“It’s hit me a few times that what has happened this year has been really special,” he says with more than a hint of understatement. The 24-year-old was not only a runaway winner of the AW International Male Athlete of the Year Award but also the Mel Watman Performance of the Year for the jump that fulfilled a childhood dream, breaking the world record in the Olympic final at the last attempt.
Mondo Duplantis (Getty)
“Yeah, for sure,” says Duplantis when asked if this is the most satisfied he’s ever been with a year’s work. “The Olympics is really the only opportunity we have to make a real global impact. I knew that, going into it: ‘If I do something really special, if I do something like breaking the world record, then this could be a really, really big deal’.
“I’ve broken the world record at World Championships, the world indoors and whatnot and it was great and it was fairly big. But this was just completely different.
“I realise a little bit now that I did it at the absolute perfect moment and, as an athlete, I guess that’s all you can ask for. You want to be able to produce your best performance at the moment that really matters the most and I was able to do that.
“There are more Olympics to come, but I did the thing. And the thing is to be one of the biggest performers at the Olympics. I’m going to forever have done that.”
That realisation has taken a little while to get used to.
“Jumping in my backyard when I was just a little kid, even though it was at three metres, I was always picturing the bar being at world record height, and in the Olympics,” he adds.
“That is the moment and I did that. I accomplished the actual thing that I’ve been saying I’d do for my entire life. It’s strange in a way because once you’ve done it, there are so many things that change, but then there are more things that stay the same.
“Life is still what it is and I’m still jumping, I’m still motivated, I’m still excited for the next year, and I want to get in better shape. More stuff comes in and there are more eyeballs pointed [at you], but it’s still the same and I guess, as humans, you just adapt to whatever situation it is.”
Mondo Duplantis breaks world record (Getty)
Rather than quickly moving on to the next thing, though, I ask Duplantis to linger for a while and to take us back to the end of that purple runway on August 5, when all of the evening’s other events had long been finished and he was the one and only athlete left competing in the Stade de France. The Olympic gold had been won, the opposition vanquished, the championships record broken.
Not one of the capacity crowd had left their seats, though.
A rumble of noise had travelled through the stands when the bar was raised to 6.25m, one centimetre higher than the world record Duplantis had set at the Xiamen Diamond League in April. The air crackled as he set about the task at hand, but the danger of all of that anticipation vanishing into the night air became very real when his first two attempts saw the bar fall. There was one last chance.
“It never crossed my mind that I wasn’t going to make it,” he says. “Maybe that was even a problem on the first two attempts, because I just knew I had that last attempt waiting for me. I almost needed my back against the wall where ‘this is the final moment’.
“I didn’t really write it up that way. I wanted to go in and not miss a single bar during the whole competition, from the prelims to the final and break the record, but it ended up being better as far as drama [was concerned].” We return to that runway.
Mondo Duplantis in 2015 [C] (Getty)
“I had this super weird sense of deja vu,” he continues. “[Since childhood] I had dreamt of pretty much exactly the moment that I was in so many times that I felt like I had almost already been there before, and I felt this really weird wave of comfort and calmness before the attempt.
“I had already broken the Olympic record, I’d won my second Olympic gold and I had all of my family there, so I’d done the biggest job. I wasn’t tense at all. It was like I had to just go and do what the picture was, and just really relax.
“Sometimes those really, really high jumps call for that because it’s so high, and it demands such a fluid and almost perfect jump that you have to let it flow. When you tense up a little bit, you miss the flow of the jump and so it’s almost like, when everything has to be so perfect, it makes you calmer, because you know that if you get caught up on any little detail you’re going to miss the next part. You just have to let it happen.”
Listening to Duplantis speak, it becomes clear that he felt no sense of shrinking from the Olympic spotlight. Instead, he raced towards it.
“There’s laser focus and I’m very locked in on what I’m doing, building up to the jump,” he adds. “That’s the most important part, the approach to the take-off, because that sets up everything and, if that’s not right, then it’s never going to work. The crowd was super huge, and it was giving me a lot of energy so it’s [a case of] channelling that and using it in your favour. I was pretty tired towards the end of the competition physically, but mentally there was such an abundance [of energy] from the crowd, and there was so much electricity, just everywhere. It’s just trying to keep it as simple as possible.”
As it has done many times before, the approach worked and Duplantis gave the people what they wanted.
Mondo Duplantis (Getty)
“They stayed because they wanted to see a world record,” he adds. “In hindsight, if I don’t make that bar, then it’s a bit of a dull ending in a way so it’s pretty crazy that I was able to end it in that way. I’ve done this a few times and I think that brings something out of me – when I’m the last person [competing] and it ends up being just my attempt, and it sends everybody off on the best note possible.”
That Duplantis was able to pull that particular rabbit out of the hat becomes all the more impressive when you consider how long his night’s work had been. A pole vault competition that had first got underway at 7pm did not come to its spectacular climax until around 10:15pm. For huge parts of the evening, the American-born Swede was quite literally playing a waiting game, which is a test in itself.
“Those moments in between are just as important as the time you’re jumping and you have to really find the balance between where you clear your mind and you clear your stress and clear your thoughts, but you still need to be focused enough on the next jump and calculate what you want to do,” he explains.
“There are a lot of numbers that we’re trying to calculate when we’re out there and we have all these decisions to make. ‘What bar am I going to go for? What pole am I going to grab? What grip am I going to use? Where am I going to run from? What speed is required for the pole and grip that I’m on?’.
“And then, of course, there’s the wind. If that’s acting funky then it throws a completely different variable into the equation. So you still have to calculate all these things but once I’ve made a decision of what I’m going to do, then I just have to trust that it’s right.
“In the meantime, I just try to just shoot the s**t [with the other athletes] and we just try to relax, because it is a really long time. I’ll have an hour or an hour-and-a-half maybe in between jumps sometimes so [it’s about] staying warm and staying ready to go for when the time is there. It is very important.”
Mondo Duplantis (Getty)
He continues: “I’m not really taking anything other people do into consideration because I try to let my body and what I want to achieve that day be the main priority. I try not to compete against the other people, but just compete against myself, because I know that if I jump the way I know I can, then I should be the guy that jumps highest on every given day.
“But just watching, just enjoying pole vault, enjoying the event and seeing the best guys in the world jumping right in front of me… that’s also still a pretty cool thing.”
During the course of our conversation, Duplantis’ unashamed love of his event becomes abundantly clear and is perhaps best highlighted when the topic of conversation moves on to how field events might be able to work their way more into the public consciousness.
With Netflix concentrating on the sprinters and Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track project focused solely on track disciplines, it’s becoming harder for those who jump or throw to get in on the action.
Duplantis, however, is quick to point out where his priorities lie. Athletes like himself and former world record-holder Renaud Lavillenie already hold their own pole vault meetings and it’s a trend that only looks set to grow.
Mondo Duplantis (Getty)
“If I had to be brutally honest, I think of myself as a pole vaulter first over being a field eventer,” says Duplantis. “The pole vault is a bit different from everything else. Of course, I want the field events to get the respect and the attention that I think they deserve, but I can’t help but make pole vault the priority.
“I just want to keep trying to put it in the limelight and if the sport is going to get more trackcentric then of course you have to think about branching out a little bit yourself and creating your own opportunities. Pole vault is such a beautiful, crazy art form and when it’s displayed in the right way then there’s nothing quite like it.”
It has been good to him, too. “Amazing things are happening in my life, and so many things this year,” he says.
Duplantis’ engagement to long-time Swedish girlfriend Desiré Inglander – he decided on the plane home from Paris that he would pop the question this autumn – fits firmly into that category. That and the Olympic experience stand alone in their own category.
If he were to pick another standout moment from his sporting year, it is not the world record-raising 6.26m clearance in Silesia from late August that comes most readily to his mind.
“The Karsten race,” he says, referring to the 100m exhibition showdown in Zurich between he and 400m hurdles world record-holder Karsten Warholm. “Even though I broke the world record three times, it was highlight number two of the year.”
Mondo Duplantis and Karsten Warholm (Getty)
Duplantis has long spoken of his sprinting prowess – it’s a key component of what sets him apart in the pole vault, too – but he was able to showcase it in style. That evening might not have been too easy on some members of his family, though.
He is coached by his father Greg, a former pole vaulter, and mother Helena, a former combined eventer who looks after the strength and conditioning and running side of things.
“I think my parents were more nervous for that than the Olympics, especially my mother,” grins Duplantis. “I think she felt a sense of pressure. This was her time to show what we do. Of course, I have to go out there and do it, but I’m just a result of all the work that’s put in before then. We have a great base in sprinting and we do a lot of sprint training. We train more like a sprinter than a pole vaulter and we’ve always thought that that’s been a real positive for our jumping. It was a moment to show it and also just have a lot of fun and compete for pride.”
With a world title to defend in Tokyo, Duplantis will be looking for more prize winning moments in 2025 – a thought that takes us full circle and back to that hunger.
“It’s alive and well,” says Duplantis. “I’m trying to enjoy it as much as I can. I have belief and I have hope that I can jump for many more years but, since turning professional in 2019 and now looking at the 2025 season, it’s unbelievable how fast that went. It makes you take a step back and try to realise how far you’ve come, and then also enjoy the rest of the ride, because I know it goes so unbelievably quickly.”
There should be plenty of time, though, to construct a few more great moments.
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