Swede sets another pole vault world record as home favourite Vuleta takes long jump title, with Ugen picking up bronze

It took a while for the World Indoor Championships to produce a noise that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up but Mondo Duplantis and Ivana Vuleta did just that on the final evening (March 20) in Belgrade.

There is unique pressure in a situation when you are expected to perform. For Duplantis that meant not only winning a gold medal but also breaking his own world pole vault record of 6.19m – a mark set in the very same Štark Arena at the beginning of the month – while Vuleta knew that most of the crowd in the stadium was there to watch her every jump.

Both athletes delivered. Duplantis incredibly, but not surprisingly, vaulted 6.20m at the final attempt to take his career quite literally to new heights and Vuleta set a world-leading 7.06m in the long jump to take gold.

The gap between Duplantis raising his world record of 6.18m set in Glasgow in 2018 to when he cleared 6.19m was 751 days. It took just 13 days for him to go higher, still.

In the last year the 22-year-old has become Olympic champion, Diamond League champion and even held his own pole vault gala in Uppsala, Sweden, but this surely ranks as his greatest achievement in the sport.

There’s something magical about the height of 6.20m. Renaud Lavillenie and Sergey Bubka have both vaulted over 6.10m – bests of 6.16m and 6.15m respectively – but Duplantis, who now has the top four indoor vaults in history and also holds the outdoor world record of 6.15m, has taken his event on to a different plane.

WORLD RECORD

He's only gone and done it again! Mondo Duplantis sets another world pole vault record with 6.20m ?

History in the making at the World Indoor Championships ??#WorldIndoorChamps ?? pic.twitter.com/v4nMWWDCcc

— AW (@AthleticsWeekly) March 20, 2022

After he cleared 6.19m there was talk of how the Belgrade surface was bouncier than normal and it certainly seemed to be true based on the evidence of what the thousands inside the arena saw on Sunday night.

Yet it took Duplantis until his last effort to produce his moment of magic. The first two attempts were aborted and it looked like that 6.20m would have to wait another time but, on the final run-up, the stars aligned and history was made.

“For the whole day I was just focused on the gold medal and I knew other guys were capable of 5.90m and 5.95m heights,” he said. “The rest is a bonus. I was so happy that I’d already won and it was like playing with free chips. I’ve got some good mojo going with Belgrade.

“It was kind of like a blackout and I don’t really know how I got here. It’s been a bit of a blur. I’m just thinking of the crowd going crazy for a world record attempt. I was a three-year-old kid who dreamed of this opportunity and it’s super surreal. I try not to take all of this for granted.

“I’m still missing the world outdoor title and that’s now the aim for me and the sky is the limit.”

Mondo Duplantis is in a league of his own in the pole vault??

07/03/22 – Sets an outright pole vault world record of 6.19m

20/03/22 – Sets an outright pole vault world record of 6.20m pic.twitter.com/5cMq1jvXxz

— AW (@AthleticsWeekly) March 20, 2022

Olympic 2016 champion, Thiago Braz, took home silver in a South American indoor record of 5.95m while Olympic 2020 silver medallist Christopher Nilsen – talked about as somebody who could challenge Duplantis for the gold medal – won bronze with a best jump of 5.90m.

An early shock occurred in the competition when KC Lightfoot, who has an indoor personal best of 6.00m and also vaulted 5.95m in Dortmund just last month, crashed out at 5.75m.

European Indoor silver medallist Valentin Lavillenie – younger brother of 2012 Olympic pole vault champion Renaud Lavillenie – also cleared a personal best of 5.85m.

Vuleta responds to packed out arena 

It’s safe to say that for the first two days the World Indoor Championships did not entirely capture the imagination of the Serbian public.

The stadium was half full at best for the first five sessions but that changed as thousands more packed into the Štark Arena to watch Vuleta in the long jump.

Organisers had given out Serbian flags for some of the fans and it made for an incredible atmosphere, the kind which everyone has missed since the Covid-19 pandemic.

This was emphasised when Vuleta took a second-round lead with 6.89m as the noise in the arena quickly turned from the heavy acoustics of over 7,000 applauding on the approach to deafening cheers when the result came through.

Then came 7.06m. Vuleta knew it was good but as the crowd started to rise to their feet there was still the trepidation of the effort being a foul, a wait prolonged now by new motion sensors which mean athletes know whether a jump is successful or not depending on the light by the side of the sand pit turning red or green.

It turned green and the celebrations began.

“I had a duty to defend the world title,” the Olympic 2016 and double world long jump bronze medallist said. My medal was like a cherry on the cake. It was incredible. It was like an out of body experience. I didn’t have an easy task jumping in front of my home crowd. That built the tension for me.

“Technically, I could have been better but who cares now. Emotionally it was everything I expected. I just went for it because the atmosphere was just incredible. I’m really happy I gave my home crowd a show. I won’t show up to any competition if I’m not 100 per cent ready, focused and on my level.”

Lorraine Ugen doubled Great Britain’s Belgrade medal tally after adding another World Indoor bronze to her  medal from Portland six years ago.

A jump of 6.82m was enough for the European Indoor silver medallist, who has a personal best of 6.97m indoors, a distance that would have won her silver medal ahead of Olympic and world long jump bronze medallist Ese Brume, who herself leapt to 6.85m.

Marc Scott won Britain’s other medal of the championships in the 3000m, in what was a challenging three days for the team as both 800m favourites Keely Hodgkinson and Elliot Giles pulled out through injury.

“It feels great to have a medal because I was even thinking of stopping the sport before this season,” Ugen said. “I wondered if I should retire, but I decided to out the work in again to get back to elite level. I’m so pleased that I was able to do that today.

“I scared myself today. I got too excited and I had to pull myself together, take a big breath and re-set. This gives me great confidence now that I can do more as we go into the outdoors. It was amazing being in the stadium with Ivana under the spotlight.

“The atmosphere was incredible and it we got such a lot of showtime. It was fantastic to have the women’s long jump centre stage.”

Elsewhere, Maryna Bekh-Romanchuk, who had earlier won Ukraine’s second medal of the championships with silver behind world record holder Yulimar Rojas in the triple jump, finished sixth in her much more favoured long jump event with a best distance of 6.73m.