Armand Duplantis achieves new heights after breaking pole vault world record to win gold | Paris Olympic Games 2024

The competitors in the men’s final march out, all car­rying backpacks. Apart from Mondo Duplantis, who wheels along an extremely designer mini‑suitcase. You do you, Mondo. There are very few events where you can tell who’s going to win from the way they come out to warm up. But here you could show the entrance to a complete pole‑vault native and they would instantly go: yeah, it’s the guy with the designer wheelie suitcase, isn’t it?

Otherwise the ritual is always the same. He inspects the runway with a jeweller’s eye. Then time for some stretches: sit-ups and oblique core exercises, but not in the measured and meditative way you’ve seen pilates teachers doing it, but ­rapidly, with a kind of violence. Then the long wait.

And you realise that being Armand “Mondo” Duplantis involves quite a lot of waiting. He is the only competitor to skip the first height of 5.50m. As everyone else takes to the runway, Duplantis sits on the floor, drumming on his knees in time to the stadium music. There are people here whose nerves are in bits, whose careers are about to be made or broken. But when you hold the eight highest vaults in history, with 17 successive wins, perhaps the pressure sits a little differently.

Finally, Duplantis deigns and makes his entrance. He vaults 5.70m like he’s basically stepping over a cat. He passes at 5.80m, returns at 5.85m, and again clears the bar with an embarrassing ease, to the extent that if he had wanted to knock it with his hand it’s not clear he could have reached it. And it looks simple, but of course in this brutally precise sport simplicity is a handy illusion: the culmination of a hundred little movements and contacts, all of which need to align in perfection.

First those 20 steps, taken with a sprinter’s speed. But then there are the miniature mechanics: the position of the hands on the pole, the strength of the grip, the way the pole slides into the groove at the back of the plate and how quickly they can respond to the “feel” of the pole as it does so. Then the gymnast’s flexi­bility to propel over the bar and curve over it. All of this while wielding what is essentially a prop from a Laurel and Hardy movie.

Sam Kendricks of the USA and Emmanouil Karalis of Greece both clear 5.90m, and both celebrate by tearing towards the crowd like ­footballers at full sprint. Duplantis, meanwhile – good banter, this – passes on this height. The bar goes up to 5.95m. Kendricks clears again. Now Duplantis, who vaults over it while smoking a cigarillo.

Kendricks and Karalis both fail at 6.00m. Duplantis has done three vaults (one he actually didn’t need) and is now the double Olympic champion. But there is very little fanfare here. The rest of the competition is now essentially the bout everyone came to see: Duplantis v Gravity, Duplantis v The Laws of Physics, Duplantis v Duplantis. Like the bit at the end of Eurovision, where the winner gets to play their song again, except it’s the Beatles and they get to play the whole of Sgt Pepper.

An Olympic record of 6.10m is shattered amid the swash of Keely ­Hodgkinson’s residual noise. And really this is an event that takes place on the off-beats, something that tends to happen while some bigger, louder things are happening nearby. But now Duplantis can try 6.25m, his ninth world record in four years, all of them worth a handsome commercial bonus, all of them cleared – with perfect, Sergey Bubka‑esque parsimony – by a centimetre.

He starts with two failures. It feels ridiculous to nitpick at a double Olympic champion for not breaking the world record. But there is a rare and cherished opportunity here to give the Games a genuinely great moment, not to mention the pole vault, a sport with a ­popularity always somewhat restricted by its own basic weirdness.

This is an event that few lay people can really grasp and fewer have ever performed to competence. In ­Louisiana, where Duplantis grew up with a pole vault set up in his back garden (yeah, I know). ­Duplantis describes himself as an “urban myth”. But with his floppy hair and haunting eyes, like Withnail played by ­Timothée Chalemet, like the subject of a Vampire Weekend song, Duplantis can be that crossover ­figure. All he needs is one leap.

And finally, with the track formalities over and the stage his own, Duplantis can make it. The roar, for the first time, is humongous and focused on him alone. He sets himself, looks up at his target, sets off. Down the runway, clean strides, clear air, pure flight, into history. The ­ritual, you see, is always the same.