The detail of Armand Duplanti’s world record that everyone missed

It was an indoor season of noble victories, but not the heights that Armand Duplantis had hoped for. After defending his indoor World Cup gold in Glasgow, Duplantis traveled home to the US, trained hard and arrived in Xiamen, China last week ready for the outdoor season.

To say the least.

Duplantis had a perfect day of competition which ended with him improving his own world record to 6.24, which he accomplished in his first attempt. Duplantis’ father and trainer, Greg Duplantis, was sitting at the airport in Beijing watching the competitions.

– Technically it was quite perfect, actually. We have a couple of parameters we look at in every jump and the world record jump here… it was pretty much spot on on everything,” he says.

The technical quality of Duplanti’s jump has been highlighted in retrospect, just like the fact that the Swedish superstar lost a little weight after the indoor season in order to have a different reaction to the bars.

But one detail from the world record jump has passed almost everyone by.

The detail of Duplanti’s world record that everyone missed

That detail is the shoes Armand Duplantis competed in. Since the WC gold in Glasgow in March, Duplantis has upgraded his shoes with, among other things, a claw at the front of the toe. These are exactly the same shoes that the Norwegian hurdler Karsten Warholm has competed in since the WC in Eugene 2022.

Warholm, who developed the shoes together with his trainer Leif Olav Alnes, is one of the few who noted that Duplantis competed in them.

– I won’t necessarily attribute the success to the shoes, but it didn’t make him worse in any case. I have never seen “Mondo” set world records so easily. So I don’t think he will change his shoes now, he says to NRK.

Warholm is both right and wrong.

Greg Duplantis, who is clear that he thinks modern track and field shoes play a much smaller role in the pole vault than in, say, the marathon, says his son really liked them.

– The shoes gave him good power in the run, so he really liked them. He has wanted to use them for a while, but they were just approved by the International Association of Athletics Federations (WA).

Duplanti’s world record shoe is destroyed

But Duplantis will not use the same shoe in Saturday’s competition in Shanghai. The pair he set the world record in are destroyed.

– Every time you set a world record, WA takes the shoes, destroys them and sends them to a lab in Stockholm where they check that the shoes comply with all the rules that exist. He only had a couple of them with him here, so we’ll see what he jumps in on Saturday, says Greg Duplantis.

How is the feeling before Saturday’s competition, what should we expect from Armand there?

– He is evidently in very good shape… I don’t like to make predictions about how high he will jump, but I know he wants to do well and that he is very much looking forward to the competition.

TV: Duplantis praised – became Track and Field Athlete of the Year again