World record holder in pole vault, Arnaud Duplantis is the favourite for a double at the 2024 Paris Games.
At 24, Armand Duplantis lives on another planet. The Swedish pole vaulter, born in the United States, has been regularly breaking the world record for the discipline for several years with disconcerting ease. It took twenty-one years to see Renaud Lavillenie beat Sergei Bubka’s legendary 6.15m by a small centimeter in 2014. “Mundo” Duplantis has taken this mark well beyond that. After a first jump of 6.17m in 2020, he now has eight world records, indoors and outdoors, and has brought the mark to 6.24m.
This latest record, set a few weeks before the Paris Games at the Xiamen meeting last April, places him as the big favorite for the gold medal at the Olympic Games. It would be his second medal after the title obtained in Tokyo in 2021.
To master his discipline, Arnaud Duplantis imposes a very specific training on himself. As he confided to the magazine GQ Before the Tokyo Games, the Olympic pole vault champion doesn’t jump every day. “When a competition is coming up, I jump twice a week. At the beginning of the season, I usually do almost only basic work and only jump once a week. All that changes when a meeting is coming up.”
Arnaud Duplantis doesn’t just do jumping or physical training to prepare for major competitions, but also a lot of running, and especially speed. Indeed, to be able to propel himself more than six meters with a pole, he has to arrive at the jumping area with a lot of speed. “Most of my training is running, sprinting. The thing that gives me an advantage over the others is that I’m the fastest on the track. I approach 10 meters per second before taking off. Today, I think I can run the 100 meters in 10’4 or 10’5.”
Finally, and this is perhaps his particularity compared to other pole vaulters, “Mundo” loves gymnastics, and has integrated some of these disciplines into his preparation. “Another important part of my training is gymnastics and upper body strengthening exercises. I work a lot on the parallel bars and rings for example.”