Renaud Lavillenie, injured, the doctors have forbidden him to run at full speed but he cannot help it, his nervous system does not allow him not to start sprinting to the mat of the pole and launch himself to Mondo Duplantis, whom he knocks down and with him, excited, embraced, he wallows happily.
It has finally been consummated, with an intimacy that the television cameras magnify, make universal, the passing of baton between the older and the younger brother, two pole vault marvels, two athletes who with strength and speed are capable of bending poles of almost six meters rigid and stiff, and so hard, like old tree trunks and turning them into a spring that makes them fly in the heights, and one has pushed the other.
A ceremony of transfer of powers that is religion in the pole, the athletic activity furthest from the ground and closest to its roots.
As Lavillenie did nine years ago at the home of Sergei Bubka, in Donetsk, the capital of the Ukrainian Donbas, which was invaded shortly after by Vladimir Putin's Russian troops, and the sports hall in which he was jumping would burn down, Duplantis, has beaten at Lavillenie's house , in the Clermont Ferrand de la Michelin and the Puy de Dôme, the world record.
The Frenchman, who is now 36 years old, then jumped 6.16 meters and could not jump higher because, excited for having jumped 6.16 meters, he later tried 6.21 meters and was injured, and it was not him again;
The 23-year-old Louisiana-born Swede leaps 6.22 meters on Saturday.
He does it with his yellow pole, 20-step run, 45 meters, on the third attempt.
It was the sixth time that Duplantis had broken the world record, but he celebrated it so exalted and happy, beside himself, as if it were the first.
🚨 IT'S GOING!
🌎
🤩 Phenomenal!
🇸🇪 Armand Duplantis is sur le toit du monde à Clermont-Ferrand en s'élevant à 6️⃣,2️⃣2️⃣ m !
Il faudra bientôt relieve le plafond!
😱
📺 Revivez le @AllStarPerche en 𝗥𝗘𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗬 sur https://t.co/xgXE6U6Tof pic.twitter.com/ihgsZ81aoh
— FFAthletisme (@FFAthletisme) February 25, 2023
"It was my great goal, to beat him here, in Clermont Ferrand, to do it here for Renaud", confessed the Swedish prodigy, the Mozart of the pole, precocious and brilliant.
Duplantis made his own for the first time three years ago, in February 2020, just turned 20, in Torun (Poland), 6.17 meters, and increased it (6.18m) a week later in Glasgow, days before he the pandemic will confine the world to their homes.
After winning Olympic gold in Tokyo, in the summer of 21, the Swede, son of an American pole vaulter and a Swedish heptathlete, took up the record lift last winter, with 6.19 meters and 6.20 meters, successively in two indoor competitions in Belgrade, and to win, in Eugene, in July 2022, his first outdoor World Cup, he raised the record one centimeter more, up to 6.21 meters,
the height that he erased in Clermont Ferrand under the ineffable gaze of an emotional Lavillenie.
“Beating him in front of him is something very special.
Without his presence, surely he would not have succeeded ”.
Mondo Duplantis is called an alien because he makes the impossible easy, as they also used to say to the Ukrainian Sergei Bubka, the czar of the pole, almost 40 years before him.
Bubka, athletically the opposite of Duplantis – he was a muscular cabinet, potential energy that was expressed in strength and refined, analytical technique;
The Swede is a light and very fast little angel who was born with a pole, or a broomstick, in his hands, and is guided by inspiration, genius, and an apparent insouciance and security–, he broke his first world record (5 .85 meters) in May 1984, and 16 records and nine years later, on February 21, 1993, 30 years ago, he left it at the 6.15 meters that Lavillenie could only overcome in 2014 under his watchful eye at home.
“I had a Bubka poster in my room,” says Lavillenie in
L'Équipe,
“but Mondo had one of mine.
I have a very particular relationship with him, difficult to describe.
The truth is that I have contributed a bit to create this monster.
He will break the record again a few times, this will not be the last, but at least once he will have done it here”.
Neither of them, neither Bubka nor Lavillenie, was able to cross the border of 6.20 meters that all the specialists had predicted for them.
That honor has come to Duplantis, who is promised by everyone, given his youth, that he will reach 6.30 meters.
It won't be this winter when he gets closer to the new frontier.
The Swede has already announced that he will not be in Istanbul at the weekend for the indoor Europeans.
In August there is an open-air World Cup in Budapest, and he will be there, willing to fly higher and repeat his motto after doing it, “the only limit is the sky”.
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