There is running, there is jumping, there is throwing things. And then there is the pole vault. On the one hand, it’s totally part of the fabric: on the climactic, final afternoon of the first modern Olympic Games, on April 10, 1896, five men—three Greeks, two Americans—lined up inside the ancient track of the Panathenaic Stadium, in Athens, with their wooden poles and waited to leap over a bar. (There was no crash mat.) The event was won by William Hoyt, a sophom*ore at Harvard, who had feigned illness to skip classes and travel to Europe.
And, yet, what is this sport? Pole vault is daunting and strange. It is men and women (since the 2000 Olympics, in Sydney) sprinting down a path with an immensely long fibreglass staff that they ram into a box in order to flip themselves, feet first, over the height of a two-story building. No other athlete in the stadium goes higher. No one makes a more rapid, or more complex, sequence of movements. No one shares an equivalent risk of catastrophe. In its daring, the pole vault belongs to the rodeo, or the circus. (Stacy Dragila, the first female Olympic champion, was a skilled goat roper.) Vaulters liken the experience to being fired from a catapult. You cannot plant the pole without the commitment to life or death. The originator of the sport, according to Ovid anyway, was Nestor, one of the Argonauts, who came up with the idea while being charged by the Calydonian boar. “Using the leverage of his firmly planted spear,” Ovid wrote, “he vaulted into a tree.”
In 2017, a French artist named Pierre Larauza found himself drawn to a series of photographs of a pole vaulter, taken by Étienne-Jules Marey, a nineteenth-century physiologist and inventor. Marey was a pioneer of chronophotography, the art of capturing movement on film. (His 1873 book, “La Machine Animale,” partly inspired Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of galloping horses.) Larauza makes what he calls documentary sculptures. In the past decade, he has made works that express the wonder of Mike Powell’s long-jump world record, from 1991, which still stands; the impudence of Surya Bonaly’s ice-skating backflip at the Nagano Games, in 1998; and the avant-gardism of Dick Fosbury’s high-jump flop.
Larauza’s sculptures, which are life-size, create a stage to place these acts. Like Marey, he seeks to capture a movement through its traces: a scrunched sneaker, an inverted skate. Larauza was intrigued by the vaulter’s relationship with the pole. “We say perche in French,” he told me last month. “I quite liked the idea that, in the process of making a movement, you use architecture or a tool.” Larauza also works as a choreographer. “I would say the pole vault is a duet,” he said. “You run, you jump, you do whatever you want, but you do it with someone else, something else.”
For his pole-vault sculpture, Larauza chose to document Sergey Bubka’s leap, on July 13, 1985—the first time a pole vaulter cleared six metres. The jump took place at the Jean-Bouin Stadium, by the Bois de Boulogne, in Paris. “I said to myself, Wow, perfect,” Larauza recalled. “The Olympics, they will be happy with this.” (His sculpture, a sequence of eight white looping poles, went on display at the Carreau du Temple, a former covered market, north of the Marais, in June, as part of the Cultural Olympiad.) Bubka set seventeen outdoor pole-vault world records between 1984 and 1994. He defined the limits of pole vaulting for thirty years, competing for the U.S.S.R. before representing his native Ukraine. He was a late Cold War emblem of grace and power. “Strong and unusual,” Larauza said. “Not strong without thinking.”
One of the mechanical—and conceptual—questions at the heart of the pole vault is whether it is a single movement or a constellation of smaller ones. The sport supports a lively scientific subculture, with investigations into the kinetic energy of the vaulter and the potential energy of the pole, maximal pelvis height, the positioning of the sagittal plane, the influence of pole carriage on sprint mechanics, and how to think about the velocity-utilization rate. In the space of a few paragraphs in the book “Winning Jumps and Pole Vault” (2008), edited by Ed Jacoby, a former U.S. Olympic coach, readers are introduced to the double-pendulum effect and invited to imagine the vaulter as the weight that slides on the shaft of a metronome. The outcome of the four phases of the pole vault—the approach; the plant; the drive and swing; and the turn, extension, and release—is largely determined by a single equation: h = v²/2g, where h is the change in height of the vaulter’s center of mass, v is their speed at takeoff, and g is Earth’s gravitational pull.
The genius of Bubka, and of his coach, Vitaly Petrov, was to make all this seem like somebody else’s problem. If you watch a slow-motion replay of Bubka’s six-metre jump, in 1985, he doesn’t appear so much to catapult himself over the bar as to simply progress into the air, like a man running up an unseen flight of stairs. This is known in pole-vaulting circles as Petrov’s free takeoff, or the “continuous chain,” a unified, flowing gesture of human expression. When Larauza finally met Bubka, who is sixty, earlier this year, at a hotel in Paris, ahead of the sculpture’s installation, he was struck by the contrast between Bubka’s upright posture —“He did not bend himself at all”—and a flowing quality to his voice and gestures, which reminded Larauza of the sea. “Pole vault maybe looks aggressive, violent and crazy—and at the same time, inside, you need to be not like that,” the artist said. “Because otherwise you cannot achieve the complex movements, which are very fluid and light somehow. You have to be light to put your body on the sky.”
Bubka’s final record of 6.14 metres stood for twenty years, until it was broken by Renaud Lavillenie, a French vaulter and Olympic champion, in 2014. For a time, Lavillenie, who is two and a half inches shorter than Bubka, and his takeoff threatened to rewrite the equations of the pole vault. In contrast to Bubka’s sinuous continuous chain, Lavillenie had a more compact, explosive technique, known as tuck and shoot. Larauza briefly considered making a sculpture of his compatriot’s record leap instead. But in February, 2020, an American Swedish vaulting prodigy named Armand Duplantis broke Lavillenie’s record twice in one week.
Duplantis, who competes for Sweden, is the Timothée Chalamet of the pole vault, and Bubka’s heir. He goes by Mondo. At the age of twenty-four, he has broken the world record eight times, on each occasion by a single centimetre. Duplantis has brown locks, sharp cheekbones, and a gaze that snaps sternly. He has endorsem*nt deals from Puma and Red Bull, and he posed for Vogue Scandinavia this spring, in a Louis Vuitton sailor suit alongside his girlfriend, Desiré Inglander, a twenty-two-year-old model and content creator. Ahead of the Paris Games, where Duplantis was the defending Olympic champion, he was not so much the favorite to win gold as cosmically obliged. Lithe and tall, Duplantis, who hosts an annual pole-vaulting competition (the Mondo Classic, which he has won every time), just seems, well, much springier than his peers. He is coached by his father, Greg, a college pole-vaulting champion from Louisiana, and his mother, Helena, a former international heptathlete from central Sweden.
The Duplantises had a pole vault setup in their back yard. When Duplantis cleared 5.90 metres at the age of seventeen—matching Bubka’s gold-medal-winning height from the Seoul Olympics, in 1988—Greg got out a notepad and worked out that his son had already made thirty thousand jumps. According to Helena, Duplantis is a very “feely” person. “His training, his jumping, his technique—it’s a lot about feel,” she told Athletics Weekly recently. He is not the daredevil of pole-vaulting cliché. “I know a lot of pole vaulters who like to do very dangerous things,” Helena went on, “but he’s not the kind of person who likes to jump out of planes or race fast cars.” Like other GOATs in their prime, Duplantis possesses a calm wonder at himself. He is comfortable with the mystery. For “The Next Centimeter,” a film made by Red Bull this year, about his achievements, Duplantis was asked to describe what he does. “Pole vault’s already hard to explain to somebody that knows pole vault,” he said.
In the qualifying event for the final, at the Stade de France, this past Saturday morning, Duplantis performed two jumps in a little more than two hours. His first, at 5.60 metres, was a loosener. But the height was already enough to eliminate Chris Nilsen, a U.S. pole vaulter and the silver medallist at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, who was a notional rival. Duplantis sat things out while the rest of the field approached, planted, drove and swung, turned, extended, and released their way to the final qualification height of 5.75 metres. Along the way, Anthony Ammirati, a French former World Athletics Under-20 champion, dislodged the pole at 5.70 metres with his penis—a textbook case of compression shorts + insufficient maximal pelvis height= lots of views on TikTok.
