Armand Duplantis had been competing for over two hours on Monday at the World Championships in Tokyo when he took a small black piece from his backpack and placed it on the tip of one of his Puma shoes. The hook, the harpoon, or as the vaulter calls it, the claw, the claw. A few months ago, Duplantis found out that his sports brand was developing an innovation for one of their stars, the hurdler Karsten Warholm, and immediately asked to try it. It was a hook-shaped extension of the carbon plate on the sole that provided greater stability on takeoff. If he could jump more securely, he could jump at a higher speed; that was the theory. And in practice, he loved the invention.
"I would use the claw in all jumps, but sometimes I get my hands caught in the jump inversion. If you ever see me with blood, that's why," he said yesterday after breaking his world pole vault record for the fourteenth time and setting it at 6.30 meters. It would be bold to attribute the record to the new hook, but its use confirms one thing: Duplantis never has enough.
Despite being the best pole vaulter in history for over five years, the Swedish athlete trained in the United States continues to search for another centimeter, always aiming for more. "I know I can go higher," he repeated in the hallways of the Tokyo Olympic Stadium as he had done so many times before. With his confidence and motivation, where is his limit? When he surpassed Sergei Bubka and Renaud Lavillenie, coaches, physiologists, and even physicists placed the human maximum where it is now: at 6.30 meters. But now, no expert dares to predict. Maybe he will reach 6.40 meters, maybe more.
Last year, Swedish researcher Ather Gattami established in a study with Artificial Intelligence that his maximum would be 6.51 meters. Who knows. The only thing certain is that this Monday, before his 6.30-meter jump, Greek athlete Emmanouil Karalis forced him to jump 6.15 meters, Bubka's old record, and he did it with embarrassing ease.
"He has broken with everything established, he has questioned everything we know," admits Alberto Ruiz 'Lobito,' a pole vault finalist in Los Angeles 1984 and Barcelona 1992, former Spanish record holder, and current head of the specialty at the CAR de Sant Cugat, who adds: "Since Bubka's era, pole vaulting was governed by certain parameters, everyone jumped in a certain way, and he jumps very differently. So we don't know."
If Bubka's jumps were based on his strength to bend the pole to the maximum, Duplantis' style is based on the speed at which he reaches the box, which is why he still has room for improvement. Under the guidance of his father, Greg, who was also an athlete, the vaulter trains like a sprinter; most of his sessions focus on getting faster, and at 25 years old, he should not consider himself at his peak. In 2020, when he became the record holder, he claimed to run the 100 meters in 10.57 seconds; last year, at a Red Bull event, he beat Warholm in the hundred meters in 10.37 seconds. Hence the progression in his marks.
Until now, each season he surpassed his own world record two or three times, but in 2025, he has gone further. He broke it in February, then in June - for the first time at home, in Stockholm - also in August, and finally this Monday. "Each record gives me extra motivation to seek the next one. I think I am in a privileged position: every time I surpass myself, it's a world record. I can focus on being the best vaulter possible," commented Duplantis, the man without limits.