On a week where nothing seemed certain, where no favourite seemed impervious to the pressure of a major championship final, Sweden’s Armand ‘Mondo’ Duplantis was ice cool, dispatching his rivals to take Sweden’s first ever men’s pole vault gold with the minimum of fuss.
It’s a measure of the 18-year-old’s ascending star that at the end of the competition, having sealed gold with a championship record of 5.82m, his expression was one of nonchalance, his three failures at 6.01m leaving the tiniest hint of frustration for an athlete of a very different calibre to his peers.
