The World’s Most Dominant Olympian Keeps Raising the Bar—and Keeps Getting Paid
Mondo Duplantis has made a habit of breaking his own world record, one centimeter at a time. That’s because he collects a bonus every time he does it.
PARIS—There has never been anyone better at flinging himself astonishingly high in the air with the help of nothing more than a bendy pole than Mondo Duplantis.
The greatest pole-vaulter of all time is the reigning Olympic champion and basically a lock to win another gold medal on Monday night at the track. Duplantis has single-handedly lifted the world record from 6.17 meters to 6.24. And the only thing more remarkable than how much he’s raised the bar is how many times he’s done it.
Duplantis, who has now broken his own world record seven times, jumps higher than any human who has ever walked the earth. A lot higher. So much higher, in fact, that his only serious rivals are himself and the earth’s gravitational pull.
“He’s like the Usain Bolt of pole vault,” says American pole vaulter Chris Nilsen.
Forget about trying to beat him. Duplantis floats nearly a whole foot higher than any of his opponents. So the question when he competes isn’t whether he’ll win. It’s whether he’ll do something that nobody has ever done before—for the eighth time.
“People just want to see a world record,” he says. “People don’t care at all how much higher it is. Every time I step on the track, that’s the only thing people want.”
Even a team with LeBron James and Stephen Curry isn’t nearly as much of a lock to win gold as a 24-year-old Swedish guy who launches himself over two basketball hoops with a few inches to spare.
If you bet $10 before the Olympics on Team USA winning gold in men’s basketball, the reward would be $2.13. Duplantis is such an overwhelming favorite that the same $10 bet on him would pay out 42 cents.
But there’s one person who does stand to make a killing if Mondo Duplantis wins and sets a new world record. His name is Mondo Duplantis.
That’s because major track meets offer bonuses to athletes if they break a world record. In other words, Duplantis has a powerful incentive to keep bumping the bar to unprecedented altitude—but only by a single centimeter each time. The man who can fly more than 20 feet high is always trying to catapult himself just 0.4 inches higher.
At a pre-Olympic meet last month, Duplantis attempted to break his record by jumping 6.25 meters and just barely missed. It cost him $50,000.
He’ll likely try again on Monday night. But even if he manages to clear the bar at 6.25, it would make no sense for him to shoot for 6.26. In fact, it would be a terrible financial decision. The more often he breaks his own record, the more he gets paid.
Duplantis doesn’t rewrite history for free. He thinks about that bonus every time he challenges the boundaries of human flight.
“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t,” he said.
He’s able to improve by precisely one-centimeter increments because unlike the long jump, which measures the exact length of each jump, the pole vault’s world record is simply a matter of how high Duplantis sets the bar. If he boosts it to 6.25 meters and clears it by a few centimeters, the world record is still 6.25 meters.
In training, he jumps about 20 centimeters lower, which means not even he knows what to expect at meets, much less the Olympics. Sometimes, he soars over the bar with daylight to spare. “And sometimes,” he says, “I couldn’t go a quarter of a centimeter higher.”
The son of an American pole-vaulter and Swedish heptathlete, Duplantis is a dual citizen who grew up in Lafayette, La. For most of his life, the world record in the pole vault belonged to Olympic legend Sergey Bubka, who pushed it from 5.85 meters to a previously unthinkable 6.14 meters between 1984 and 1994.
That’s where it would remain for the next 20 years.
French pole vaulter Renaud Lavillenie hit 6.15 meters in 2014, and it took until 2020 for Duplantis to pass him by one centimeter. But it didn’t take long for Duplantis to beat himself. One week later, he broke the world record again.
Since then, he’s done it so many times that even Lavillenie doesn’t compare himself to Duplantis these days.
“He’s clearly on another planet,” he said.
Perhaps more than anyone on this planet, Lavillenie understands exactly what it takes every time Duplantis signals he’s ready to fly higher. And he knows that the real action in the Stade de France might just start when the competition is over.
“That opportunity to go for a record,” he says, “it’s such an exquisite moment.”