This Swedish Pole Vaulter Might Be the Best Olympian in Paris
The best pole vaulter in, say, the United States can walk into any crowded downtown square and go entirely unrecognized. Armand “Mondo” Duplantis, of Sweden, can’t enjoy such anonymity in his country. To be fair, Duplantis isn’t just the best pole vaulter in Sweden. He’s the best in the world, and in fact, the best to ever hurl himself 20 feet in the air to clear a bar, having broken the world record on eight different occasions.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Still, we’re talking about pole-vaulting here. Not soccer or hoops or cricket or rugby or tennis or any other more mainstream, globally popular endeavor. So Mondo-mania is something to behold. American Chris Nilsen was in Stockholm with a small group of pole vaulters for a meet last year, and someone asked Duplantis if he wanted to go outside to grab a cup of coffee. “He immediately got nervous,” says Nilsen, the Olympic silver medalist—behind Duplantis—at the Tokyo Olympics. “Heat and sweat down his face. And we’re like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’” Duplantis asked the group to pick him up a black coffee; when they stepped outside, they soon understood why Duplantis elected to sit this trip out. He’d get mobbed.
“We see that there’s multiple billboards of Mondo just outside the hotel,” says Nilsen. “There’s signs of Mondo on coffee shops. Everyone knows who he is. It’d be like Tom Cruise walking down main street.”
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Nilsen compares him to Usain Bolt. Another vaulter calls him the Patrick Mahomes of his nation. How about the LeBron James of Sweden? “It sounds really weird to say it like that, but in a kind of way, yeah,” says Duplantis, 24, during a video interview in mid-July from Stockholm, where he was preparing for Paris.
Just a few days earlier, for example, Duplantis—who was born in the United States to a pole-vaulting American father and Swedish heptathlete mom—did venture out. A group of teenage girls, seeking selfies, besieged him. “There’s a lot of times, in the grocery store or whatnot, I strike up a conversation just randomly with somebody,” says Duplantis. “Then I realize that they definitely know who I am. You think you might have found somebody that doesn’t. Pretty much they always do.”
Mercifully, strangers are for the most part respectful when he’s out and about. “Unless they’re drunk,” he says. “Then it becomes different. They have the courage to be on me a little bit more.”
Sweden has exported sports superstars before: Bjorn Borg, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Annika Sorenstam, to name a few notables. And now Mondo Duplantis, whom World Athletics, the global governing body of track and field, has named athlete of the year three times since 2020. He was nominated, along with Lionel Messi, Novak Djokovic, Erling Haaland, Noah Lyles, and Max Verstappen, for the prestigious Laureus World Sportsman of the Year award for 2024 (Djokovic won). That’s some impressive company.
Duplantis earns between $30,000 and $100,000 every time he sets a new world record. So he strategically raises the bar by a single centimeter to break it as often as he can. “I think I would be lying if I didn’t say that was a part of it,” Duplantis says of the financial considerations.
He first broke the record held by Renaud Lavillenie of France, 6.16 m (20 ft. 2 ½ in.), in Poland in February 2020, when he cleared 6.17 m (20 ft. 2 ½ in.). His latest mark: in China this April, Duplantis vaulted 6.24 m (20 ft. 5 ½ in.).
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Duplantis can lay legitimate claim to being the best Olympic athlete in the world. Only Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles, perhaps, dominate their sports like he does. “Out of 10,000 athletes, that’s the one who, if we were waging a milkshake, I’d wager a milkshake on him to be the gold medalist,” says NBC Olympics host Mike Tirico. The pole-vault final is on Aug. 5, and thanks to both his American connections—he grew up in Lafayette, La., and attended LSU., where he was buddies with sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson, for a year—and his all-time greatness, look for NBC and networks around the globe to go big on Mondo.
“If I tell you that the best cellist ever is on the corner of 50th and 6th, we’re gonna to go walk over and watch him,” says Tirico from Studio 8H in Rockefeller Plaza during NBC’s Olympic media presentation in late June. “So if I’m telling the audience that the best ever to do the pole vault will be competing tonight, a lot of people will stay to watch that, regardless of nation.”
Dupantis refuses to generate a headline by declaring himself the most dominant Olympic athlete you’ll see in Paris. “It’s hard for me to compare apples and oranges,” says the Swedish diplomat. Though he doesn’t demure when told that at least one media knucklehead is prepared to make a case. “I appreciate it,” Duplantis responds.
He started pole vaulting around age 4, in the backyard of his Lafayette home, where his dad set up a runway, pit, bar, and mat. “I was just so obsessed with it, from the very beginning,” says Duplantis. Having such ready access to the sport “gave me a nice little kickstart, for sure,” he says.
The name of a 2022 documentary about his life is Born to Fly. “When I’m doing it really right and everything’s clicking and I feel like I’m jumping really, really well, it’s like I’m in such control of everything in such a cool and crazy way,” says Duplantis. “I’m playing this dance almost with the pole. I have such a good feeling with it. We’re one, in a way.”
Duplantis spent summers in Sweden as a kid. His older brother by seven years, Andreas, had represented the country in international competition. So it wasn’t surprising that by the time Mondo was a freshman in high school, Sweden reached out. Competing for Sweden offered some practical benefits: the nerve center of the sport is in Europe, where most major competitions take place. Also, he could avoid the punishing Olympic trials system that persists in the United States. American vaulter KC Lightfoot, who cleared 6.07 m (19 ft. 11 in.) in 2023 to set a new American record, was bounced in the first round at the U.S. trials in Eugene, Ore., this year. He’s not going to the Olympics.
Plus, he’s a standout in Sweden, as opposed to another niche sport athlete in the United States, which tends to reserve its idolatry for basketball and football players. Duplantis’ sponsors include Puma, Omega, the Swedish electric-car manufacturer Polestar, a Swedish dental chain called Aqua Dental, and CapitalBox, a Finish fintech company.
Since moving to Sweden after his year at LSU, Duplantis has enhanced his Scandinavian street cred by embracing his heritage. He described his language skills as “survival Swedish” before the Tokyo Olympics, but he says he’s “solid” now.
“I just had this kind of funky little American Louisiana accent, which is pretty uncommon here,” says Duplantis.
He drives Polestars. While he hasn’t found Cajun food in Sweden, he enjoys the Swedish spin on crawfish. “You boil it and then refrigerate it and eat it cold,” says Duplantis. “And you soak it in this dilly kind of water. The fish is more salty and dilly and fresh-tasting rather than heavily seasoned and battered.”
His relationship with Desire Inglander, a Swedish fashion model and influencer, has also raised his profile. In the past few months, the couple has appeared in Vogue Scandinavia and canoodled in a Stockholm wooded area as well as a track-and field-stadium, in front of the Roman Colosseum, on a private plane, and in other exotic-looking locales, according to the enviable images they’ve posted on Instagram. “The teenage age group, that’s what I’ve really picked up in the past year or two,” says Duplantis. “Des and I both.”
With another world record, this time in Paris, he’ll add even more followers—of all ages, around the world. “The Olympics bring completely new eyeballs to the sport,” says Duplantis. “Go out and do something special, do something that’s never been done before. That’s the goal. And I feel confident about it.”
LeBron. Simone. Sha’Carri. Some Olympians require just one name.
Why not Mondo?