The Swedish pole vault superstar opens up about what went into his Olympic triumph in Paris
Mondo Duplantis is back at work. After a four-week hiatus that followed the summer of his life, the man upon whose every move the Stade de France crowd hung on a sultry night in early August has begun grafting away on the follow-up.
When he sits down to talk with AW over a video call from Louisiana, he is a handful of weeks back into full training and in search of that feeling of physical sharpness, speed and power he had been able call upon at the crucial moments only a few months previously.
He has rid himself of the “weird obsession” with fried chicken that developed as he let the strict diet slide during his time off. Now it’s a hunger of a very different sort that he is looking to satisfy.
Mondo Duplantis (Getty)
“It’s funny,” says the man who retained his world indoor, European and Olympic pole vault titles, as well as breaking his own world record no fewer than three times over the course of 2024. “I did everything [I wanted to during this] last year and I really couldn’t have written the story any better. It was exactly how I envisioned it. But then you start training again, you feel like you’re not in good shape and then you’re frustrated. I feel pretty good jumping, but I’m just not in the same shape that I was in in August.
“There is something nice about it, though. It keeps the motivation so high and, for me right now, it’s like it doesn’t matter what I did [during this] last year, in a way. Of course, I’m super grateful for it and it’s amazing, but I have to make sure I keep performing. I want to make sure that I’m still dominant.”
Duplantis is someone who likes to live in the moment. In fact it’s a job requirement for someone who can face lengthy waits between jumps during a major championships (we’ll come back to that later) so he admits it has only been recently, having picked up a pole again, that something has occurred to him.
“It’s hit me a few times that what has happened this year has been really special,” he says with more than a hint of understatement. The 24-year-old was not only a runaway winner of the AW International Male Athlete of the Year Award but also the Mel Watman Performance of the Year for the jump that fulfilled a childhood dream, breaking the world record in the Olympic final at the last attempt.
Mondo Duplantis (Getty)
“Yeah, for sure,” says Duplantis when asked if this is the most satisfied…
CLICK HERE to Read the Full Original Article at AW…