Who wouldn’t want to be Mondo Duplantis, Lafayette’s blond genius?
Run, jump, fly higher than anyone, do not eat the coconut, no one believes and for its veins it runs Swedish blood and Rhythm and Blues Tremé. It is very cool and organize pole tournaments in which their friends, the best jumpers in the world, relax waiting for their turn of airport vip rooms, pull each other and an animated disc jockey puts them their favorite music, or what she believes, an electro version of Sirtaki for the Greek (Manolo Karalis, bronze in Paris), Sweet Caroline For the Marine Yanqui (Sam Kendricks, silver in Paris), and Mondo marks the rhythm with Bop, The song that he composed and recorded in a New Orleans studio, a little Dancehalla little reggaeton, hip hop. And following the rhythm with their palms, Kendricks, Lavillenie, Manolo, all rivals, heat and motivate the public delivered even while their idol runs like a devil through the red carpet that is the jump corridor and nail the pole in the box when it has reached a speed of 10.48 meters per second (almost 38 per hour) and doubles the pole and is impulsed, and is discussed.
“It is indifferent that the new athletics competitions, such as the Grand Slam of Michael Johnson, do not include competitions. I worry only what I can control. The pole. Get the main contest to remain. And that is what the athletes of the other competitions have to do, to put on and exhibit their specialty in the way Renaud [Lavillenie] And we are doing it, organizing very nice competitions, fun, entertaining, creative … ”, says Duplantis, 25, 11 world records up to 6.27m in its history and two Olympic golds. He speaks with half a dozen journalists around the world in a videoconference from Uppsala (Sweden) on the eve of their participation, surely star, in the World Cups on covered track, from the next Friday to Sunday in Nanjing (China). “One of my best friends is a musician in Louisiana. And I have a few friends here in Sweden who are also musicians. I found myself in a study a couple of years ago and it was a super fun experience, it completely absorbed me. It was a way to get me completely from pole jump and athletics, very therapeutic for me. And I had the idea of throwing my song, Bopwhich is a fairly funny issue, the same day as the competition [se refiere al 28 de febrero pasado, cuando batió en Francia el récord del mundo por 11ª vez] To have fun more, because it was more like a and if I make a record the same day [y en inglés juega con la palabra record, grabación y plusmarca]? And then, curiously, it happened in the way I imagined. Very cool ”.
No, he does not feel the loneliness of the gifted in a specialty in which since 2018 he has only lost a final of a great championship, when Kendricks defeated him in Doha 2019, and in which the second always stays at more than 20 centimeters (all young people now enter the box at full speed, imitating it). “The competitive level is higher than ever. What happens is that I jump a lot, I have raised the pole to another level, but there are jumpers like Sam [Kendricks] Or, especially, Manolo [Karalis] That, if I had not been, in the last 10-15 years they would have won amount of medals and championships. I have uploaded the level a lot and that motivates others to try to reach me. Someone will come that will be better than me. That is safe. It will happen sooner or later. But I am very competitive and while I continue here, I will try to make sure that I am always the man to beat, ”says the athlete who at age 20 beat the world record for the first time (6,17m), and knows that imitating it there are already youth that run like crazy, bold, without stopping, to nail the stick into the box at full speed.
No, no, and neither does the vertigo of who feels predestined, in the clouds. “I think of the maximum height that I can probably achieve less than people think. It is increasingly difficult to progress, obviously, but I do not think about it. But, yes, I am already very close to 6.30m and I would like to overcome that height soon, but then I will not obsess thinking about another height, I’m not so crazy. ”
Also, like other children prodigy of gifted sport, Mozarts of the pedals such as Pogacar tadej or running shoes, such as Jakob Ingebrigtsen, does not suffer from the horror of the void that can be the lack of motivation or the species of postpartum depression that assaulted Michael Phelps when he hung the swimsuit. One that at 25 has won two Olympic golds, two outdoor World Cups, two on covered track, three Europeans outdoors and one on covered track, what else can ask for your sport, what else can motivate you to continue dedicating your blood. “I would not compare me with the Phelps situation. I will see that when my career is over, ”he says. “I think of the pole all the time, and I always think of ways to improve, and I always want to get the best of myself. I am super obsessed with the pole jump, of course, and I have been having it as a child, but, strange as it seems, I am also able to do other things. Live the present moment. I think I find in life an unusually good balance between my sport and other things that maintain my busy brain. It helps me to be surrounded by many people, brothers and sisters who practice very different sports or musicians. I am obsessed with her, yes, but the pole is not everything. I am not completely defined how I am. I simply love and it is very good, but I am sure that I can live a life in which there is no jumpiga. It will be a difficult transition, but I have confidence that I will find a new meaning to life. ”
The obsession was born as a child. The pole, he counts, transformed him, discovered a world, a bubble, in which he only existed. Reality disappeared. The world. “When I am in the air I feel exactly the same as when I was a child. I feel the same then jumping two meters as almost 6.30m. Sorry, perhaps in a super strange way. I really don’t know how to explain it, ”he says, and is thrown into an attempt:“ When I have the pole in my hand and I am on the track it is like a rare type of tunnel and control vision, and something that absorbs me completely happens. I am only concentrated and locked in the moment and in what I want to get. And that happened to me the same when I was younger. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if it is in the courtyard of my house, at age seven, or in the Olympic Games, it is the same. It is the same type of sensation. Before I feel nervous, butterflies in the stomach, excitement and all the feelings that everyone feels. The difference is simply that I have a fairly good control of my emotions. ”
As Dashiell Hammett took out the police novel from the ebony halls and Persian carpets in mansions with butlers, and the detective as a magician of the enigmas games to submerge it in reality, the mud and the blood of the street, thus Mondo, that, following the path his precursor Lavillenie, a light and obsessed pertiguist of Soviet Fornidos and returned it to those of the Race of Los Angeles, to himself. “Yes, it is not badly lying that I am a kind of lavillenie 2.0,” Duplantis replies to the colleague of L’équipe which establishes the comparison with the Frenchman who beat in 2014 the last record of Serguei Bubka with a 6.16m jump. The key to change is not force, it is speed. Or not. “It is mostly in the sprint Where probably work harder, but the pole is everything. It is the sprintspeed, strength, technique, all the little things that are added, discover new information, different ways of getting those few extra centimeters. It is such a complex and difficult proof, with so many intríngulis, that at the same time that makes it very difficult, it also offers infinite possibilities of improving. There are always small ways to improve and continue advancing. ” And this knowledge of his body, the interoception that makes him perfectly calculate the energy of his cells, and the awareness that the pole is a labyrinth, make him close the pole with the golf, a sport that he likes to practice, although he does not find time for it, and that he enjoys as a spectator, and admires his geniuses, Annika Sörestam, Swed Tiger Woods. “Golf is so, so incredibly difficult and technical and so mental, and not very physical, which I think makes it even more difficult because there really is no way to avoid things,” he says. “It is a sport that I definitely admire, as I admire the golfers who do so well.”
Mondo is nailed to Timothée Chalamet in his physique and in his roles, little thing between physical monsters, and so fresh and determined, the clear look, and, as the Franco -American actor who sings like Bob Dylan, he also sings and if he does not ride on giant worms to those who guide by the desert indifference, of carefreeness. “My parents [Greg, expertiguista, y Helena Hedlund, exjugadora de voleibol y heptatleta] They are my coaches and we talk. We talk about everything and also the mental issue, which I try to keep it as simple as possible, because I think that many times, as a athlete, it is very easy to eat coconut. And that is usually the biggest problem, ”says Swedish persistent persistent. “And what people who think too much is to run, run like the rabbit in their scared burrow, seeing only everything bad that can happen to them. I try to free my mind and only concentrate on what I want to happen, what I want to achieve. ” And to achieve this, he is not seen aspiring worm powder, he simply touches on the floor of the stadium, a cylinder on his back, and sleeps. He, in his bubble; The world, going crazy. Who wouldn’t want to be him?
