PARIS – So that everyone understands how high Mondo Duplantis went Monday night at Stade de France in winning the Olympic men’s pole vault, a big – and we are talking now a very tall – giraffe, at the tippy top of its ears, is way, way up there, like 20 feet down to the ground.
Born and raised in Louisiana to an American dad and Swedish mom, Duplantis competes for Sweden. On the third of his three tries, having raised the bar a full 15 centimeters from what he had previously cleared easily, the crowd howling, truly one of the best bits of Olympic theater in recent memory, Duplantis went 6.25 meters to win gold and set a new world record – 20 feet, 6 inches.
The new record was exactly one centimeter over the prior Duplantis mark, 6.24. The man is a showman. Like someone before him.
Mondo Duplantis clearing the bar on his gold-medal, world record-breaking jump // Getty Images
“I knew he would do it,” said Sergei Bubka, who is now 60 and knows a thing or two about pole vaulting and, at a newish chapter in his professional world, is, now more than ever, thriving, as ever his authentic self.
If these are great Olympics for Mondo, they arguably are even better for Sergei Bubka. The only pressure on Sergei was to award the medals Tuesday night at the stadium.
In every way, Bubka, the Seoul 1988 pole vault gold medalist, has earned what he now has – the right to be one of the great ambassadors of not just track and field but Olympic sport and the critical idea that underpins all of this, simply trying to be the best in this life that you can be.
And perhaps something far more proround.
Two years into war, there is around Sergei Bubka a deep appreciation for what he has helped get done, and, too, for the people and projects that have proven the worth of what inside the Olympics is called “Solidarity” and what ordinary people would call the recognition of our common humanity.
Just days after the war broke out, the IOC set up a multimillion-dollar fund to direct aid to Ukrainian athletes. Bubka, an IOC member and formerly president of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, was put in charge of a task force, which included the European Olympic Committees and an in-house IOC division formally called Olympic Solidarity. Operations were supervised in significant measure by a senior IOC staffer, Pamela Vipond, who, as Bubka said, deserves way more credit than she has ever gotten over the years.
The fund has helped literally thousands of athletes via hundreds of projects.
The Ukrainian freestyle aerials ski team trained in Utah. Artistic swimmers in Turkey. And more.
“We will always have big Olympic values,” Bubka said. “But in Solidarity now, our movement is so powerful.”
The crowds here in Paris have him “very excited” about the state of the Olympic movement: “As we can see here, such emotions. Full stadiums. Unbelievable.”
“This is sport’s gift to the world,” he said. “The best example to live in peace. Unite the world.”
Los Angeles in four years? “Huge respect” for the team at LA28, he said. “Lot of interesting ideas” coming up, he said – wait and see.
After many years at the most senior levels of the governing board of what is now World Athletics, Bubka termed out. This is the story of one door opening when another gently shuts. He has embraced, with appreciable enthusiasm, the presidency of the International Masters Games Association, which puts on regional and World Masters and Winter Masters Games.
The World Masters Games, the IMGA’s key event, is formally the world’s largest mass-participation international sports event – open to athletes aged 30 and over.
The next edition is set for next year in Taipei. It will draw tens of thousands. Mottos: “sports beyond age” and “life without limits.”
The Pan American version of the Masters Games wrapped up in Cleveland – Cleveland is supposedly now, uh, worth visiting – two weeks ago. It drew maybe 4,000 competitors. These people spend a lot of dollars.
These Masters events are a very real if still mostly under-the-radar thing.
“They’re coming with their families. Their kids. Their grandkids. They grow in this environment,” Bubka said.
There’s the winning but whatever: “They want to live longer. This movement is longevity, vitality, healthy lifestyle. This is really what [the world] needs. And people are so excited.”
Excited?
You should see anyone and everyone around Sergei Bubka.
Everywhere he goes in Paris, the people want to talk to Sergei Bubka
He is arguably one of the few athletes from the Soviet era – when he won in Seoul in 1988, he was representing the Soviet Union – who managed to make a connection with the West.
From the beginning.
They remember how he was the first to clear 6 meters, a height that seemed impossible until Bubka did it in 1985.
How he went up bit by bit, until he reached 6.15, indoors, in his hometown, Donetsk, Ukraine – 20 feet, 2 inches – in 1993.
In 1994, at a summer meet in Italy, he went 6.14, 20 feet, 1 3/4 inches.
If there might have been commerce at work – world records were worth something, and he broke the record, all in, indoors and out, 35 times – Bubka nonetheless did something incredible.
To begin, he humanized a generation of athletes from behind the Iron Curtain.
Bubka set his first world record in May 1984. The Soviet boycott kept Bubka out of the Los Angeles Games. Rocky IV – the antagonist is the Soviet fighter Ivan Drago – would open in 1985.
More, far more, Sergei Bubka would come to understand that he was working on a grand stage.
He was not just performing.
He was turning in a performance.
Alone on the runway, the bar still and waiting for him and him alone, thousands upon thousands of eyes locked on to the display of speed and power he was about to unleash to break the bounds of gravity, to fly, to offer the thrill of what it could be like up there 20 feet off the ground, Sergei Bubka came to define a fundamental truth.
Sport could be turned into – art.
“First of all,” he said, “I always like people. And respect the people. And especially through my career, the people give me motivation to perform well, to put new goals to compete for them.
“Because in the beginning, when you are young, when you start your career, in most cases, you are like – I love it, I enjoy it. I was very competitive. Of course, in the beginning, it’s something you do more for yourself. As my career went on, as I started to achieve more and more results, and I proved to myself that I can do something on this planet, I turned the sport to art – to go like an artist on the stage, to perform for the crowd.
“If I come to the stadium,” he went on, “and I’m in excellent shape, and if I do a world record, and I see [people] in the stadium, what for? For myself? I proved. This,” he said, “was an interesting period of transition.”
He went on a moment later:
“I want to say that the people give me motivation. And energy back. I want to give these people these feelings because, for them, maybe [a] photo is [a memento] for life. And many people who I met in my life, like, their kids you see .. in her kids’ room, it’s my big poster.
“I always try to make this moment of happiness when people ask to sign or to do the photo.”
Two stories from Sunday, just a typical day out and about at an Olympics, with Sergei Bubka.
He had been out at the equestrian venue. Then he had to go to golf. The driver said, when we arrive, can I have a photo? “I said, of course, with pleasure, no question.” They got to the golf venue but police had blocked the road. The driver rolled down the window and said to the officers, look – it’s Sergei Bubka. Oh, OK, go. But not all the way to the clubhouse. Because another set of officers made Bubka and the driver get out maybe 100 yards away. But there these officers said, Mr. Bubka, can we have a picture with you?
Which was taken, the officers with their machine guns and everything.
And the driver got his picture, too.
Later in the day, after Bubka visited with the president of the international wrestling federation, Nenad Lalovic of Serbia, at a site back along the Seine, Bubka, his son and, as it turned out, three others had to make their way north to the Stade de France, about 35 minutes away – if they could find a car.
After a 15-minute walk along the river, any number of people pointing – look, it’s Sergei Bubka – a Paris 2024 van was found, idling in the shade on a major north-south street. One of the others asked the driver if it was possible to go to the track and field stadium. Umm, no, not really. Then they said, but, look, here’s Sergei Bubka. Oh! A quick call and everyone was on the way.
Sergei Bubka with the volunteer driver who got him Sunday afternoon to the Stade de France
But when we get there, the driver said, can I get a selfie?
Absolutely, Bubka said.
“This is my way,” he said. “This is my culture. This my education. My parents educated me like this. But I feel I make these people very happy.
“Some colleagues who asked me for signatures 30 years ago, over 20 years ago, when I was an athlete – now they are presidents of [track and field] federations in their country, they are coming to me and they say, Sergei, 20 years ago, when I asked you for your signature, you didn’t say no, you signed.
“I am like this.” He laughed. “Sorry.” But not really. Not even, like, one little centimeter’s worth of sorry. It’s all good for Sergei Bubka right now.
“I always try,” he said, “to do my best.”