Finally, Mondo Duplantis has the spotlight. The formalities on the track have been dispensed with, Keely Hodgkinson has won her gold medal, Noah Lyles has been awarded his, and for the first time this evening all eyes are on a 24-year-old from Sweden via Louisiana, the bar suspended 6.25m high and the still, warm air between them.
Duplantis has already won his gold medal, his second in a row. Nobody really cares about that part very much. He had to jump four times to win the competition, and it turns out it didn’t really need to do the first two, or the fourth. It’s a little like the bit at the end of Eurovision where the winner gets to play again, except the winner is The Beatles, and the winning song was Octopus’s Garden, and now they’re going to play the whole of Sgt Pepper as an encore.
