Mondo Duplantis

In the backyard of a house in Lafayette, Louisiana, Greg Duplantis built a pole vault pit. He was a world-class vaulter himself — he had competed for the United States, reached the finals of the 1988 Olympic Trials — and he wanted his children to understand the event not as a performance but as a way of thinking. His son Armand, born November 10, 1999, was four years old when he first tried to clear a bar. He cleared it. He tried a higher one. He cleared that too. The backyard became a laboratory, the laboratory became a legend, and the legend is still in progress.

Armand Duplantis — Mondo, as the family calls him, because his full name begins with the letters of the Italian word for world — grew up between two identities. His father is American; his mother, Helena Hedlund, is Swedish, a former heptathlete who brought her own athletic intelligence into the household. When it came time to choose a national flag, Armand chose Sweden. The decision made geopolitical sense — Swedish athletics had the infrastructure, the sponsorship ecosystem, the competitive programme he needed — and it gave him a larger story. He would be the American-born boy who vaulted for Scandinavia and broke records that had been set before he could read.

By the time he was ten years old, Duplantis had already set age-group bests for 11 and 12-year-olds. The trajectory was not gradual but geometric: each year, the number climbed in ways that confounded projection models. As a teenager he was competing at — and frequently winning — Diamond League events. At 17, he was ranked among the best vaulters in the world. At 20, in February 2020, inside a packed arena in Glasgow, Scotland, he cleared 6.17 metres — and broke the world record that had stood for nearly two decades. The crowd understood what they were watching. Duplantis barely seemed surprised.

What followed was the methodical accumulation of records with a discipline that would have impressed Sergey Bubka, the Ukrainian who pioneered the art of breaking his own record incrementally to maximise prize bonuses. Duplantis adopted the same strategy: raise the bar by one centimetre at a time. Each millimetre is another record, another bonus, another entry in the archive of human achievement. The philosophy is deliberate and rational — and it reveals a mind that understands sport not just as performance but as a long game. By the spring of 2026, he had broken his own world record fifteen times. The current mark stands at 6.31 metres.

At the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Duplantis won gold with a vault of 6.02 metres. He was 21 years old. At the Paris 2024 Olympics, he defended that gold and then, because the occasion demanded it, broke his own world record again — this time in the final itself, raising the bar to 6.25 metres in front of a stadium that had waited all night for exactly this moment. The French crowd, which might have preferred a home-country victory, gave him a standing ovation that lasted so long the organisers had difficulty moving on to the medal ceremony.

The Duplantis family remains central to everything. Greg coaches him with the quiet authority of a father who has spent a lifetime inside the event. His brother Antoine also vaults — he competed for Louisiana State University — and the household has always been a place where sport is discussed with the seriousness of an academic discipline. Helena provides the emotional equilibrium. Mondo himself is calm in a way that is slightly unnerving for a young man who has broken more world records than any other athlete in the history of his event.

He is now the unambiguous greatest pole vaulter in history. The question the sport asks — how high can he go? — is one that Duplantis himself answers with a lightness that suggests he already knows, and he is choosing not to tell us yet. At 26, with multiple world championships, two Olympic golds, and a world record he has now revised fifteen times, Mondo Duplantis still seems, improbably, to be warming up.