Grant Holloway, Yulimar Rojas and Mondo Duplantis in Belgrade (© Getty Images)
Women's world triple jump record
15.74m Yulimar Rojas (VEN) Belgrade 20 March 2022
Men's world 60m hurdles record
7.29 Grant Holloway (USA) Belgrade 20 March 2022
Men's world pole vault record
6.20m Mondo Duplantis (SWE) Belgrade 20 March 2022
6.19m Mondo Duplantis (SWE) Belgrade 7 March 2022
World records set by Yulimar Rojas, Mondo Duplantis and Grant Holloway during the indoor season have been ratified.
Rojas’s 15.74m triple jump, Duplantis’s 6.20m pole vault and Holloway’s 7.29 clocking in the 60m hurdles – all achieved on the same day, 20 March, at the World Athletics Indoor Championships Belgrade 22 – are all now officially in the record books, as is the 6.19m Duplantis cleared at the Belgrade Indoor Meeting earlier in March.
Duplantis’s 6.20m vault and Rojas’s 15.74m leap are outright world records as they are superior to the best ever outdoor performances achieved in those disciplines.
Rojas, competing on the morning of 20 March, opened her competition with a safe looking 15.19m in the first round and then fouled in the second. In the third she was beyond 15 metres again (15.04m) then she had another big jump in round four – landing at a mark that looked near her own world lead of 15.41m – but that was judged a foul.
The next was not. She jumped 15.36m to match the championship record set in 2004 and miss her own world indoor record by just seven centimetres.
She wasn’t done, though. Taking to the runway one last time, she engaged the crowd and was roared to her fifth consecutive global gold medal, landing at 15.74m to win by exactly a metre.
Her winning leap not only smashed her own world indoor record of 15.43m, set in Madrid on 21 February 2020, it also surpassed her own outdoor world record of 15.67m, set on 1 August 2021 at the Tokyo Olympic Games.
“Coming here, I knew it was the right time to achieve this and I took the chance,” said the Olympic champion. "The 16-metre mark is my big goal. Every day, I am trying to add one more centimetre to get closer to it.
“Now, I want to focus on the World Athletics Championships in Oregon,” she added. “I think there is a big chance of making a double, in the long jump and triple jump.”
Later that day, the evening session started with a bang when world champion Holloway sped to a 7.29 victory in the semifinals of the men’s 60m hurdles, equalling his own world record.
The US sprint hurdler won that race by almost a quarter of a second – an incredible margin for the semifinal stage of such a short distance in a global competition. His winning time matched the world indoor record he set in Madrid on 24 February 2021.
He went on to win the final in 7.39, earning his first world indoor crown.
Less than an hour after Holloway won the 60m hurdles final, the championships reached a crescendo when Duplantis scaled 6.20m, adding a centimetre to the world record he set at the same venue just 13 days prior.
The Swedish vaulter breezed through his earlier heights, clearing 5.60m, 5.85m and 5.95m on his first attempts. Just two other men were left in the competition at that latter height: Olympic silver medallist Chris Nilsen and 2016 Olympic champion Thiago Braz. Nilsen was unsuccessful, while Braz got over it on his third try but went no higher.
Duplantis, meanwhile, cleared 6.05m – again on his first attempt – and then had the bar raised to 6.20m. After two misses, the Olympic champion was successful on his third and final try.
“To break the world record two times in two weeks, I can't complain,” said Duplantis, who vaulted 6.19m at the Belgrade Indoor Meeting on 7 March – a world record that improved on his previous mark of 6.18m set in Glasgow on 15 February 2020.
“Sometimes there are just things that you can't explain, they're just feelings and it seems like when I'm in Belgrade I have this feeling that I'm going to go high and do something really special.”
World Athletics
