In 1992, on the eve of the Barcelona Olympics, the world’s greatest basketball player met track and field’s greatest gravity defier. Michael Jordan, fresh from winning another NBA title, bragged about his high jump and long jump prowess at school. Sergei Bubka, who by then had amassed 30 pole vault world records, attempted a two-handed dunk and failed. Sports Illustrated, there for the ride, billed it as Air Jordan meets Air Bubka.
And Jordan was clearly impressed. At one point, when it was pointed out that Bubka was about 20 feet high when he started coming down from a vault, he whistled softly. “No way I’d try that,” he admitted. “You won’t catch me killing myself.”
Can you imagine that happening now? LeBron James and, say, the world high jump champion Mutaz Barshim meeting as near equals – and their achievements being lauded and applauded in a publication read by millions?
Perhaps it is not quite so far fetched as it once was. Because on Saturday night at an indoor meeting in Poland, athletics’ latest incredible flying machine, Mondo Duplantis, jumped higher than anyone in history to set a pole vault world record of 6.17m. Imagine soaring over a London double decker bus – and still having more than a metre to spare. Or being able to jump over a giraffe. That gives some sense of Duplantis’s mindblowing feat.
And while the American-born Swede’s name might be unfamiliar to those outside track and field, there is no need to worry: there will be plenty of time to learn it given Duplantis only turned 20 in November.
Incidentally, back in the 1960s, Sports Illustrated hailed pole vaulters as “supreme among track and field athletes” because in their one event they are “the synthesis of them all, combining, in relatively moderate supply, of course, the speed of a sprinter with the strength of a javelin thrower and the spring and elasticity of a high jumper – [while their] 16-ft vaulting pole makes it necessary that they be cunning, too, in order to get it safely from one competition to another”.
That last point is often harder than it sounds. One former world record holder, Don Bragg, was almost electrocuted when his pole hit a power line as he tried to board a train at Philadelphia’s 30th Street station.
The magazine also picked on something else too: “As a breed pole vaulters just naturally seem to be a daring bunch, else they would not be flying around up there on a swizzle stick that weighs only four pounds and is not built to last.”
When Bragg was 10 he would – according to Sports Illustrated – use ropes to “swoop 60ft through the air from tall oak to tall oak, emitting the soprano bellows of a young ape”. As the magazine also noted: “Young Bragg aspired to be Tarzan, and in the process he developed a tremendous body frame, the pectoral muscles and arms of a stevedore and a hand grip that would make an oyster wince.” He never did get his wish to be a film star – although an Olympic title in 1960 was some compensation.
Duplantis comes from a similar lineage. His father Greg, an elite pole vaulter in the 1990s, describes his son as a “little reckless” and remembers him jumping off roofs on his skateboard. And, crucially, Duplantis also has the personality to match his extraordinary ability – and agility.
“Ever since I started vaulting in my backyard, when I was in diapers, I wanted to be the best that’s ever lived – to break the world record,” he said after setting his world record. “It’s something I have been shooting for since I was three.”
Yes, you read that right. Duplantis broke his first age group world record at seven, when he cleared 2.33m, and continued to set world bests right up to his world junior record of 6.05m at 18. That confirmed his special talent to a wider audience. Saturday’s vault only reinforced it.
The burning question is whether track and field can capitalise on its new wave of talent. It certainly needs to given it is nearly three years since Usain Bolt departed, leaving a 6ft 5in-sized hole in the sport.
In an Olympic year names such as Duplantis, the trash-talking 200m star Noah Lyles and the 20-year-old women’s 400m hurdler Sydney McLaughlin must be propelled from the hardcore to the mainstream. Part of that is down to the sport. But athletes need to step up too.
As Seb Coe, the president of World Athletics, put it to me a few years ago: “Look at Conor McGregor, who has got my kids talking about UFC.
“I’m not saying people should be like him – but I want more of them to give a view on things and to show their personality. That will make the media find them more interesting and help the public to become more engaged.”
Duplantis certainly did that at the weekend – diving into the crowd to hug his mother, Helena, a former elite heptathlete, before telling reporters: “I don’t think everything has sunk in, I feel like I’m hallucinating. It feels like I’m in a fake world right now, I need to let this sink in.”
It will eventually. As will the immutable fact to the wider world: that Duplantis is very much the real deal.
