Mondo Duplantis provided the highlight of the opening Diamond League meeting in Xiamen, China on Saturday 20 April when the charismatic pole vaulter – one of the most recognisable faces in athletics – soared clear at a world record height of 6.24m, the 301st world record on a Mondo track.
It was also Swedish superstar’s eighth world record of his career and four of them, half his total, have now come on Mondo tracks.
Duplantis took just four vaults – clearances at 5.62m, 5.82m, 6.00m and a world record 6.24m – during the competition.
“The indoor season was sloppier than I would have liked, so I had some fire in me today,” Duplantis confessed after his latest superlative, despite winning the world indoor title in Glasgow on another Mondo track just seven weeks earlier to add to his impressive list of honours.
“I really wanted to show what I could do here. For me to jump a world record I need everything to be in the right place; I’d never jumped here, and I didn’t know what kind of track it was, but obviously it was okay,” he joked.
It was the second year that the south-east China port city has been a stop on the Diamond League with the inaugural meeting at the 53,000-capacity Egret Stadium, which has a Sportflex Super X 720™ track, taking place just seven months ago at the end of the last outdoor season.
Another world record almost fell in Xiamen, with Ethiopia’s Gudaf Tsegay winning the women’s 1500m in 3:50,20 to move to third on the world all-time list.
Tsegay has already set one world record on a Mondo track when she established the current world indoor/short track 1500m record of 3:53.09 three years ago in Lievin, France.
Five more Diamond League meetings will be held on Mondo tracks this summer.
No other track manufacturer can boast of having so many Diamond League meetings staged on their tracks this summer.
In addition, the Roma 2024 European Athletics Championships and the athletics events at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will also be staged on Mondo tracks.