Sweden’s Mondo Duplantis Broke His Own Pole Vault World Record (Again) After Already Winning Gold

Field events at the Olympics typically do not get a chance to take center stage, as the track events tend to hog the spotlight, but on Monday night the pole vault competition was the headliner at Stade de France in Paris. That’s not because there was any drama about who would win the gold, as Sweden’s Mondo Duplantis (who is from Louisiana, but represents his mother’s homeland of Sweden) was the biggest favorite of any event at the Games.

Instead, everyone was waiting to see if Duplantis, who held nine of the top 10 jumps in history, would break his own world record of 6.24 meters. Duplantis won gold over American Sam Kendricks when he jumped 6.00 meters — Kendricks went 5.95 meters — but his competition was just beginning, because his battle isn’t with the rest of the field but with himself and history.

He started by taking down the Olympic record with a jump of 6.10 meters, clearing it easily, and setting the stage for a world record attempt.

In front of a frenzied crowd, Duplantis clipped the bar on his way down on his first two attempts, needing more speed to get deeper over the bar — he had the hip height — to complete the jump. On his third and final attempt, he did just that, and the stadium went absolutely nuts.

It’s insanely cool to be so good at your sport that the main attraction is not whether you’ll win, but whether you will set a new world record — which you’ve owned for two years. Duplantis keeps upping that bar, one centimeter at a time, and made some Olympic history with the stage all to himself.