Renaud Lavillenie, injured, the doctors have forbidden him to run at full speed but he cannot help it, his nervous system does not allow him not to sprint onto the pole mat and throw himself at Mondo Duplantis, which he knocks down and with him, agitated, embraced, he wallows happily. It’s finally done, with an intimacy that the television cameras magnify, make universal, the pole vault handover between the older and the younger brother, two pole vault miracles, two athletes capable of bending almost six poles with strength and speed Feet rigid and stiff and as hard as old tree trunks and turning them into a feather that makes them fly up and one pushed the other.
A ceremony of transfer of power that is religion in the Pole, the sporting activity furthest from the ground and closest to its roots.
As Lavillenie did nine years ago at the home of Sergei Bubka in Donetsk, the capital of Ukraine’s Donbass, which was shortly afterwards ambushed by Vladimir Putin’s Russian troops and would burn down the gymnasium where he jumped, Duplantis struck at the house of Lavillenie, in the Clermont Ferrand de la Michelin and in the Puy de Dôme, the world record. The Frenchman, who is now 36, then jumped 6.16m and couldn’t jump higher because, excited at having jumped 6.16m, he later attempted 6.21m and injured himself, and it was him again not; The 23-year-old Swede from Louisiana jumped 6.22 meters on Saturday. He does it with his yellow cane, a 20-step run, 45 meters, on the third attempt. It was the sixth time Duplantis had broken the world record, but he celebrated it as excitedly and happily beside himself as if it were the first.
🚨 IT’S GOING! 🌎
🤩 Phenomenal! 🇸🇪 Armand Duplantis is sur le toit du monde à Clermont-Ferrand en s’élevant à 6️⃣,2️⃣2️⃣ m !
Il faudra bientôt relieves le plafond! 😱
📺 Revive yourself @AllStarPerche in 𝗥𝗘𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗬 south https://t.co/xgXE6U6Tof pic.twitter.com/ihgsZ81aoh
— FFAthletisme (@FFAthletisme) February 25, 2023
“It was my big goal to beat him here in Clermont Ferrand to do it here for Renaud,” admitted the Swedish child prodigy, the Polish Mozart, precocious and brilliant. Duplantis first made 6.17 meters in Torun (Poland) three years ago, in February 2020, just 20 years old, and improved a week later in Glasgow (6.18 m), days before confining the pandemic world to her homeland . After Olympic gold in Tokyo in the summer of 21, the Swede, son of an American pole vaulter and a Swedish heptathlete, set the record lift last winter with 6.19 meters and 6.20 meters in two consecutive indoor competitions in Belgrade. and to win his first outdoor World Cup in Eugene in July 2022, he added another inch to the record to 6.21 meters, the height he erased in Clermont Ferrand under the indescribable gaze of an emotional Lavillenie. “Beating him in front of you is very special. I certainly wouldn’t have made it without his presence.”
Mondo Duplantis is called Alien because he makes the impossible easy, as the Ukrainian Sergei Bubka, the Tsar of Poland, was told almost 40 years before him. Bubka, athletically the opposite of Duplantis – he was a muscular cabinet, potential energy expressed in strength and refined, analytical technique; A light and very fast little angel, the Swede was born with a pole or a broomstick in his hands and is guided by inspiration, ingenuity and an apparent insouciance and security – he broke his first world record (5.85 meters) in the May 1984 and 16 records and nine years later, on February 21, 1993, 30 years ago, he left it at the 6.15 meters, which Lavillenie was only able to overcome in 2014 under his watchful eye at home.
“I had a Bubka poster in my room,” says Lavillenie in L’Équipe, “but Mondo had one of mine. I have a very special relationship with him, hard to describe. The truth is that I contributed a bit to create this monster. He’s going to break the record a few more times, this won’t be the last, but he’ll do it here at least once.
None of them, neither Bubka nor Lavillenie, managed to exceed the 6.20 meter limit that all the specialists had predicted for them. That honor went to Duplantis, who, given his youth, is promised by everyone that he will reach 6.30 metres. It won’t be this winter when he nears the new frontier. The Swede has already announced that he will not be taking part in the European Indoor Championships in Istanbul this weekend. There is an outdoor world cup in Budapest in August, and there he will be ready to fly higher and afterwards repeat his motto: “The only limit is the sky”.
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