Perfection is a dangerous word unless you’re Mondo Duplantis
For years, the talk around Armand Duplantis has not been about him winning. It was about how far he could push an event that already seemed to bend around his abilities. Pole vaulting, a discipline built on edge, patience and nerve, was discovered by someone who sees his limits as temporary.
By 2025, that dominance had hardened and become rarer. Duplantis won her third World Athletics Championships gold medal in Tokyo and won her fifth straight Diamond League title in Zurich. He did not lose any competition all year. He broke the world record four times, raising his own ceiling to 6.30 meters. At the end of the season, he was named the men’s sportsman of the year and the BBC’s Foreign Sports Person of the Year.
It is difficult to list such achievements without exaggeration. But the numbers stand on their own. Sixteen competitions. Sixteen victories. Four world records in one calendar year. A sport that normally rewards patience instead rewards inevitability.
At the Paris Olympics last year, he broke his own world record and then sprinted down the track to kiss his fiancée, Desiree Englander. The moment was spontaneous and raw. It has been repeated millions of times. Overnight, he became a more than dominant athlete. He has become a recognizable figure outside of athletics.
He repeated the scene at the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo. Again the final jump. Another world record. Again, England is waiting by the side of the road. This time there was also a new variable under his feet. A custom spike he calls the “Rabbit” is fitted with an aggressive front overhang designed to maximize high-speed grip. Duplantis jokingly describes it as medieval. The effect is anything but strange.
That idea ties into why Duplantis feels differently. His advantage is not only height or time, but primarily speed. He runs the runway like a sprinter, developing a speed that others can’t quite match. The rod does the rest. He believes the next iteration of the shoe could help him reach a height of 6.40m.
What makes this season particularly poignant is how unassailable he has become. Great athletes are often defined by the competitors who challenge them. Duplantis exists in a slightly different space. The field is strong. It’s just not strong enough. His world records don’t come after chaos or despair. They come after a quiet, efficient execution.
That raises an awkward question as the sport moves into 2026. This is not an Olympic year. It is not the year of the World Cup. For most athletes, seasons like these are a blur of preparation. For Duplantis, preparation has become indistinguishable from high performance.
He is 26 years old. He may have another decade. Ten more world records is not an outlandish prediction. More Olympic titles will not shock anyone. By his early 30s, he could remove the event from historical mystery altogether. Here the conversation becomes less about performance and more about purpose. How does an athlete stay engaged when the pursuit seems one-sided? At what point does victory stop feeling like progress?
Shohei Ohtani’s 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in baseball felt like a deliberate redefinition of what was possible in one season. Arsenal’s unbeaten football campaign years ago showed how perfection can still miss something. Perfection, it turns out, is subjective. It depends on context and consequence.
Pole vaulting further complicates that discussion. It doesn’t attract the attention of the world of sprinting. It lacks weekly team sports history. For Duplantis, this is both a limitation and a freedom. There are fewer distractions, less expectation of reinvention.
Sometimes there are suggestions for experiments with other events. They are usually well-intentioned and mostly pointless. Duplantis has publicly toyed with the sprinter. He’s not going to trouble elite 100m sprinters in their prime. And it is not necessary to dilute what has already been proved to be historical. The truth may be simpler. His challenge now is not to find something else to conquer, but to continue to care for the marginal improvements that only he can fully appreciate.
If the statues and Mount Rushmore controversy seem premature, that’s only because he’s still writing history. What 2025 showed was not that Duplantis had reached the end of ambition, but that he had rebuilt it. Perfection is not the finish line for him. It’s a moving target that only he seems to be able to see. The question is no longer whether he will clear the bar. It’s how high he’s willing to take it.
