Flamingos call it a goblin, and, they don't have it in the throat, as Lorca said, but it goes up from the inside of the soles of their feet, and even if they have it, if they don't show up there is nothing to do and Camarón is not Shrimp and Paco de Lucía play very well and nothing more, and Mondo Duplantis has it, and in the single February 2020, leap year, he had invaded every time he had claimed it, in Torun (Poland), on February 9 , and in Glasgow, a week later, when he twice beat (6.17m and 6.18m) the world pole vault record. Until Wednesday, February 19, when he failed in his three attempts to exceed 6.19m.
For the first time, Mondo launched his career on a floating platform corridor, raised on the track, the hollow element that offers some athletes an advantage for the jump, those who know how to handle and find the trick, due to its perceptible trampoline effect, and that others misplaced. It is the type of hall that appeared in all records on the indoor track of Bubka and Lavillenie. Before failing before 6.19m, he had surpassed the first 5.60m, 5.80m, 5.90m and 6.07m, and had done so with such slack that, according to specialists, he would have surpassed the record without any problems from them.
He did so before 5,000 spectators on the crowded track of Liévin, in northern France, closer to Brussels than to Paris, the same place where Bubka had beaten him, with 6.14m, on February 13, 1993. With these three nulls, Mondo's February no longer resists the comparison with the absolute perfection of the 40 days of 1991 (between February 9 and March 23) in which Bubka broke his world record four times (in four different cities : Volgograd, San Sebastián, Donetsk and Grenoble) making it grow five centimeters, from 6.06m to 6.11m.
"I've been doing it for so long that pole vaulting is as natural to me as riding a bike," says Mondo, who in 2018, at age 18, was proclaimed champion of Europe with a jump of 6.05m, in an interview that publishes L'Équipe. “I have made the quality jump, I think, thanks to my best physical preparation, I am faster and stronger. Technology has nothing to do with it, I wear the same shoes as the others and the poles are the same ones that Bubka or Lavillenie already used. ”
Before Duplantis was born, Sergey Bubka had left the record at 6.15m in 1993, six years before Duplantis was born in Lafayette (Louisiana, United States). And this one, who had learned to jump with a broomstick on a sofa almost before learning to walk, already said at age six, when Bubka seemed as untouchable as Mars, that he would break the world record. Until 2014 the man could not overcome it, the Frenchman Renaud Lavillenie did it in 2014, and left it at 6.16m. Duplantis, pertiguista like his father, Greg, who also trains him, and also agile, powerful, unique and Swedish on the part of mother, Helena, heptathlete, is destined to reach 6.25 before late, according to specialists, whenever he recovers the state of grace of the previous attempts.
The sportsmen call it elf now flow, and they tell each other, I'm in flow, everything flows, everything is easy, I don't think about what to do, I don't invent strategies, I don't reason, I do it, and I know that if I think about it I don't do it; "I run without a chain," say the cyclists, and all the golfers in the world - perhaps the athletes who most resemble the pertiguists, who one day bend the pole with precision as who does not want the thing and others are not even able to know how to do it — they call it inspiration and still dream of Seve Ballesteros, the genius who in his days saw blows that no one had had the ability to even think they could exist, and other days, a few, he could not control the flight of the ball . Txema Olazabal, Seve's outstanding student, expressed it: “there are times that I put myself in and I know where the ball is going to go and other times I place myself the same and I know that it will not go where I intend. It’s like that. ”
Duplantis, who, like Ballesteros, was Seve, is already Mondo, without more, he expresses it with leaps that can only be defined as incredible for his perfection, with rhythm, breadth, aggressiveness, conviction and balance. It is the consequence of his absolute mastery of the discipline for which he came into the world, for which he is endowed with an innate talent, a gift that is neither acquired nor learned, but is perfected, and he has done so with thousands of jumps since he was born. And as the artists Mondo confesses, perplexed: "I have no idea where my limits are."
On Sunday 23, in Clermont Ferrand, Lavillenie's house, his friend, his idol, will put them to the test again, and if the goblin ascends him again from the sole of his feet, he will overcome them again. And everyone will keep trying to guess how far it will go.
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