Swedish and a track and field superstar Armand Duplantis bent the pole vault to a new ME score of 624 last weekend in China.
Now an interesting detail has been found about his competition.
“I don’t think anyone noticed,” the athletics coach Leif Olav Alnes said NRK:lle.
Alnes was referring to the shoes that Duplantis wore in China. The shoe in question is familiar to Alnes, because the one he coaches, a top athlete Karsten Warholmhas used similar ones.
In these shoes, the toe is bent upwards to improve performance.
Warholm already used a prototype of spikes at the 2022 World Cup with a kind of claw or protrusion at the tip. The purpose of the cantilever was to increase the contact time between the shoe and the running track so that the step would have more power and speed.
Duplantis has already cured ME eight times. Photo from last August from the World Championships in Budapest.
NRK also caught up with Warholm to comment on Duplantis’ ME competition.
“I wouldn’t necessarily blame my success on my shoes, but at least they didn’t make my performance worse. I have never seen “Mondo” [Duplantis] jump the world record that easily, so I don’t think he’ll change shoes,” Warholm said.
However, the change of shoes is ahead of the weekend in Shanghai, said the father of the pole star Greg Duplantis For Expressen.
“Always after the world record WA [Kansainvälinen yleisurheiluliitto] “destroys” the shoes and sends them to Stockholm, where it is checked that they meet the rules,” father Duplantis told the Swedish newspaper.
The development and tuning of shoes to improve performance has divided opinions, but for example the ME man with three jumps Jonathan Edwards doesn’t think it’s bad.
He compared it to motor racing.
“Formula 1 is a good example. There are fantastic racers, but also a technical battle between teams. I believe that a similar development is coming to athletics as well,” Edwards said according to NRK.
Armand Duplantis, 24, has already broken the pole vault world record eight times.
There may be something new.
The evening paper reported that in Duplantis’ most recent ME jump there was five centimeters between the jumper and the bar.
Duplantis is considered one of the surest Olympic winners in Paris next summer.
He is defending the Olympic gold he won at the Games in Tokyo.
In addition, the Swede has already won a total of four world championships in his career – two on both outdoor and indoor tracks.