Will the Breakout Star of the Olympics Be a Swedish Pole-Vaulter?
Everybody remembers what they did last spring right before they couldnt do much of anything. Mondo Duplantis went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. This was in February 2020, not long after he jumped higher than anybody in the history of pole-vaulting and established himself as the favorite to win the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics. He was fresh off a plane from Europe and ready to party. Life couldnt have been much better for the best pole-vaulter ever. I felt like I was on top of the world, he says. But at the heart of pole-vaulting is a humbling sense of inevitability. No matter how high you jump, you will crash back to earth. His fate in this case was out of his control. The greatest month of Duplantiss professional career was February 2020and by March 2020 the only place for him to compete was his backyard in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he was born and raised. He found out the Olympics were being postponed in his childhood bedroom. Where the Olympic dream started and died, says Duplantis, now 21, more than a year later. But it didnt die, of course. Where the Olympic dream startedand then got put on pause.  Hes been living in that strange purgatory ever since. Over the past decade, the Olympic Games have been threatened by nuclear war, terrorism and infectious diseases, but perhaps never before has such a huge majority of a country been so opposed to hosting the Olympics. With most people in Japan not exactly thrilled about inviting lots of foreigners to their biggest city in the middle of a pandemic, it often feels as though the organizers are launching themselves over a bar without a mat on the other side.