• Mondo Duplantis returns to the city that he calls ‘a very special place’
• The Swede, only just days ago, broke the world record for 15th time
• The three-time indoor world champion could match the legendary Sergey Bubka

Just before last year’s World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, Mondo Duplantis released his first single. Now, to the accompaniment of his own music, the Swede continues to break world records. And in Toruń, he will be hunting for another one.

The three-time world indoor champion returns to the place where it all began. It was in Toruń at the 2020 Copernicus Cup where he set the first world record of his career with a vault of 6.17m.

“Toruń is a very special place for me since I broke my first world record there,” said Duplantis. “I’ve been fortunate enough to break a few since then, but the first one is a life-changing moment.”

The world and Olympic champion will return to the Kujawsko-Pomorska Arena just days after clearing 6.31m, his 15th world record, at the Mondo Classic in Uppsala. And in case clearing a world record at your own meeting wasn’t enough, he did so to the backdrop of his own song, ‘Feelin’ Myself’.

The 26-year-old has won the past three world indoor titles with the three highest vaults in World Indoor Championships history: 6.20m in 2022, 6.05m in 2024 and 6.15m in 2025. And if he wins in Toruń, he will equal Sergey Bubka’s record haul of four world indoor titles.

But despite heading to Poland in record-breaking form, nothing is guaranteed – especially in an event where another athlete has taken attempts at world record heights this season.

Emmanouil Karalis, who took silver behind Duplantis at the World Indoors and World Championships in 2025, recently cleared 6.17m at the Greek Indoor Championships in February to move to second on the world all-time list. He then took a couple of attempts at a would-be world record height of 6.31m.

Of the 41 competitions in which Duplantis and Karalis have clashed, the Greek vaulter has come out on top only once: the 2018 World Indoor Championships, where Karalis placed fifth and Duplantis seventh.

Perhaps it’s something of an omen that when Poland last hosted the World Indoor Championships, in 2014, there was a Greek winner on that occasion (Konstadinos Filippidis).

But Duplantis and Karalis aren’t the only vaulters heading to Poland in PB form. Sondre Guttormsen, the 2023 European indoor champion, set a lifetime best of 6.06m, which USA’s Zachery Bradford has cleared 6.01m and Australia’s two-time world bronze medallist Kurtis Marschall has vaulted 6.00m.

With five men on the entry list who have cleared 6.00m this season, plus another two athletes with PBs above that height – world medallists Chris Nilsen and Ernest John Obiena – the competition in Toruń could produce record depth.

Piotrek Przyborowski for World Athletics

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