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Armand Duplantis has had great success during the Olympics.
But now come highly unexpected and harsh words about “Mondo”.
“There is a myth that Armand “Mondo” Duplantis is one of the world’s greatest athletes. But that is not true at all,” writes Teodor Stig-Matz in the magazine ETC.
Millions of Swedes followed Armand Duplantis during the pole vault final in the Olympics. At 24 years old, he has already been the world’s best pole vaulter for many years now, but in Paris he wrote new sporting history.
Duplanti’s success
The 24-year-old provided the very best of entertainment as he gave all 80,000 spectators and billions of TV viewers something unforgettable in front of a packed Stade de France. “Mondo” first won the Olympic gold with ease without tearing once, then the Swede broke a new Olympic record and saved the best for last.
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The bar was raised to 6.25 meters and Duplantis fulfilled a childhood dream by breaking a new world record at an Olympics. One of the great highlights of the championship and which many will remember for a long time.
The words about Mondo
But now comes unexpectedly hard against the Swedish world star Armand Duplantis. With the headline “Duplantis is not a great athlete”, the writer has Teodor Stig-Matz wrote a column in the newspaper ETC that has stirred strong feelings in sports Sweden.
“For people in Sweden, this may seem strange. ‘Duplantis is the superstar of athletics’, ‘One of the world’s greatest athletes’, that’s how it usually sounds in the Swedish newspapers. It’s just that this is absolutely not true,” he writes.
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The reason is that Netflix has released a new documentary series about athletics and there is not even “Mondo” in it, instead it is only about 100- and 200-meter runners. Therefore, Stig-Matz raises his voice so that one should not believe that Duplantis is as world-renowned as many are convinced, obviously a highly controversial opinion and therefore many have reacted against the column.
“No one outside of Sweden (except maybe twelve Kufas who love pole vaulting so much they have Sergej Bubka tattooed on their thigh) knows who Armand Duplantis is. He is rarely written about in the international media and on Instagram he has a number of followers on par with a former Paradise Hotel participant,” writes the columnist in the newspaper.
“And it’s not Duplanti’s fault. Because nobody knows what pole vaulting is either. Which isn’t particularly strange – it’s a weird damn sport. Other athletics disciplines have a natural raison d’être. Man has always wondered how far and how high it is possible to jump, how fast it is possible to run. How high can you jump with a pole? Not so much”.
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The writer believes that the outside world’s interest in pole vaulting is “comparable to that of the World Cup in pole vaulting”. And so Duplanti’s success suffers because it is such a small sport with few practitioners.
“The fact that Duplantis, who grew up in the United States, switched to his mother’s nationality when he started competing must be seen in retrospect as one of the smarter decisions in sports history. As an American, he had been as famous as any other American pole vault star, that is, not famous at all. As a Swede, he is a national hero and plays golf with Prince Daniel,” writes Teodor Stig-Matz in his text.
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