Mondo Duplantis reacts after winning big at the BBC Sports Awards 2024

By Abhiruchi Rout

Modified Dec 17, 2024 22:09 GMT

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Two-time Olympic gold medalist Mondo Duplantis has reacted after being honored at the 2024 BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards. The pole vaulter was named World Sport Star of the Year for his phenomenal 2024 season.

Besides earning the Olympic title with a new world record (6.25m), Duplantis’ remarkable season saw him win his second consecutive World Indoor title, become a three-time European champion, and cap off the year with a fourth successive Diamond League crown. Following receiving the prestigious honor, the 25-year-old reacted by sharing the post by BBC Sport on his Instagram story, captioning it with two blue hearts:

“💙💙”

Screenshot of Duplantis’ Instagram story - Source: via @mondo_duplantis on Instagram

Notably, Mondo Duplantis shattered the global record on three occasions in 2024. Apart from achieving the feat at the Olympic Games, he had earlier broken it at a Diamond League meet in Xiamen back in April.

He went on to shatter the record once post the Olympics at a Diamond League competition in Poland, where the Swedish-American athlete made a clearance of 6.26m.

Duplantis claimed the top spot, edging out top competitors like Simone Biles, Catherine Debrunner, Sifan Hassan, Leon Marchand, and Caitlin Clark.

Mondo Duplantis reflects on his world-record performance at the 2024 Paris Olympics

Mondo Duplantis at Paris 2024 Olympics. (Photo by Steve Christo - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Mondo Duplantis reflected on his world-record performance at the 2024 Paris Olympics, several months after the event. He opened up about the emotions and thoughts that crossed his mind leading up to the record-breaking moment. In an interview with Athletics Weekly, he said:

“Yeah, it never crossed my mind that I wasn't going to make it. Maybe that was even a problem on the first two attempts because I just knew I had that last attempt waiting for me and it's like I almost needed my back against the wall a little bit to where like, ‘This is the final, this the final moment.’ I didn't really write it up that way. I wanted to go in and not miss a single bar the whole competition from the prelims onto the final and break the world record, but it ended up being better as far as dramatic wise." [0:15 onwards]

“I almost had this like super weird sense of like deja vu because it felt like I had been in this situation before and I think maybe because just being a child and I've just dreamt of pretty much exactly the moment that I was in so many times that I felt like I had almost already been there before”, he added.

Duplantis also mentioned that he might have felt a sense of calmness, having previously won the gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. At the Tokyo Olympics, he claimed the prestigious gold with a clearance of 6.02m.